giibvitvti af §0nptH, 



^^/..// ■ ' ...z/ 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



I 



^ 



STUDIES II RELiaiOK. 



BY THE AUTHOR OF 



^^ WORDS IN A SUNDAY SCHOOL." 





NEW- YORK: 

C. SHEPARD, 191 BROADWAY. 

1845. 









Entered according to an Act of Congress, in the year 1845, 

B Y C . Shepard, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District 

of New- York. 



63^3 



JAS. P. WRIGHT, PRINTER, 

74 Fulton, cor. Gold st. N. Y. 



W% A .;. . 



\ A^ V # 



^^ 



CONTENTS. 

Spirit p. 9 

Truth 20 

Law and Love 27 

Grace 28 

Baptismal 49 

Insight V 55 

Knowledge through experience - 65 

New Year 81 

Water - 83 

Snow 92 

Worship ib. 

Communion 104 

Star-child Ill 

Sonship 113 

Faith 131 

The White Horse 139 

Duty 141 

Sympathy 159 

Doctrine of life 161 

Virtue 175 

Retribution 192 

The Future ^2 

Sound 214 

Home 215 



t 



STUDIES IN RELIGION. 



SPIRIT. 

We meet together, a band of learners ; every 
thing inrites us to study : every thing seems 
to us in possession of a secret, and allures 
us by the promise of unfolding it. We are 
at home in our world, and yet not at home in 
it. We are full of questions. The overhead 
sky, with its floating islands of condensed 
light, the broad earth, the regal domain of 
flowers, the shy birds, the serious animals, the 
busy insects, — to all we say. Tell unto us, 
whence come and whither go you ? They 
move around in dignified possession. We are 
all askers of them. We importune them in 
their haunts, follow them to their recesses ; but 
they say nothing : they are dumb, alas ! for 
1 



10 STUDIES IN RELIGION, 

them and us. A subject still more interesting 
tflin this world without, invites us. We ques- 
tion about ourselves : we become unto our- 
selves a study. Whence and why came we 
hither, with these curiously fashioned eyes and 
ears, these impish fingers, this irresistible vigor 
that burst forth in the leap and shout of in- 
fancy, these visions of future might, that wove 
their fantastic shapes so early in the hidden 
life of the child, that " wheel within awheel," 
those sudden wailings of affection, that weak- 
ness, that thoughtlessness and yet unconscious 
consciousness of thoughts, far back in itself, 
and yet not belonging to it : a possessed crea- 
ture ? Whence this wondrous childhood, — 
this questioning youth ? 

Man, we are told, is a spirit in a body. I 
suppose all that this means is, that we are con- 
scious of not being our body, but somewhat 
above, or, as it were, interior to it ; and to this 
interior force has been variously given the 
name of soul, spirit, speaking of it as one ; or 
mind, heart, affections, &c-, speaking of its 
modes. That which we call soul is not sepa- 
rate from body, but lives through it : has taken 
form, become embodied. All that we see is 
the form of somewhat, is something embodied. 



SPIRIT. 11 

That which we see, touch, — in a word, which 
appears to all or any of the senses, — is body, or 
form, or appearance ; and that which is not 
body, but the embodied, not appearance, but 
the appearer, we call spirit. 

Spirit is then the invisible force, behind or in 
every thing that appears. The outward is not 
reality, but the form of it : the outward is the 
manifestation of the inward : the sensuous is 
the apparition of the spiritual. The human 
frame, no more than the stars and flowers, but 
equally with them, are appearances of an in- 
visible reality, — of spirit. The star is bq^y, 
so the flower, so our form ; all equally impres- 
sions on the senses of an invisible force : the 
star one form of spirit, the flower another, the 
human frame another — all equally wonderful, 
divine, mystic. It is not in a figurative sense 
that flowers and stars are our brothers. They 
and we are alike the out-putting of invisible 
force : we are stars glowing here and there in 
the immeasurable arch of God's being ; w^e 
are flowers springing upward from the earth 
and withering to it again ; and the flower 
and the star, like unto us, are mortal forms of 
immortal spirit. 

Now, this body, this outside, this appear- 



12 STUDIES m RELIGION. 

ance of spirit, whether it be the human mani- 
festation, or stars, or flowers, or words, or 
deeds, is limited, ended, finited or finite. Every 
thing perceptible to the senses must necessarily 
be finite ; for, if it were not so, the senses 
could not take note of it. The reason we see 
an object, is because it is formed, limited, fi- 
nite, has an end. Could we conceive its su- 
perficies sloping off* into infinite space, we could 
not see it ; only where it stopped, where it be- 
came limited, would it become visible ; only 
as it took end, become finite. The invisible 
must take form in order to be visible, — the in- 
finite take finity. That which appears is ne- 
cessarily formed ; that which takes form is ne- 
cessarily finite ; and so these two words, finite 
and infinite, come to represent the two great 
facts, which include all other facts : the finite 
expressing all that is outward, that has taken 
form in nature, in humanity, in word, or deed ; 
the infinite expresses the invisible, the form- 
less, the spirit. 

Now, as the finite is the limit, the narrow- 
ing, the obstruction of the infinite, it must al- 
ways be less than the infinite ; and, for this 
reason, the finite and sensuous, beautiful as it 
may be, can never satisfy man, whose nature 



SPIRIT. 13 

is the continual reception of the infinite ; and 
when religious teachers tell us that earth can- 
not fill and satisfy the soul, they only utter the 
mathematical truth, that the less cannot con- 
tain the greater. All creation, in whole or in 
detail, being a manifestation of spirit to the 
senses, and so finite, cannot, in any conceiv- 
able possibility, satisfy the spirit in man ; for 
the outward good must be always less than the 
inward need ; and the spirit in man can be 
sustained only on that which is spiritual and 
infinite. 

Now, all virtue consists in the sovereignty 
of the spirit over the sensuous ; and spirit- 
culture is the deepening and extending of 
spiritual power over the outward and finite. 
Strictly speaking, we cannot perhaps increase 
the aiTtount of spirit in us. The primal quan- 
tity of being seems given at birth ; it constitutes 
the difference between mediocrity and genius. 
God gives as it pleases him, — to one more, to 
another less. 

^* He is free and libertine, 
Pouring of His power, the wine 
To every age, to every race." 

And yet so greatly are the conditions, under 
which spirit is given, put under our control, 
1* 



14 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

that we do, in an important sense, lessen or in- 
crease our spiritual force. By an entire absorp- 
tion in outward phenomena, in the passing, the 
transient, the corruptible, the sensuous overlays 
the spirit ; and this is sensualism ; and the 
spiritual nature seems oft-times to near die out 
of the man. It must be so, necessarily ; for 
like is nourished by like, spirit feeds on spirit ; 
and absorption in the outward lessens the pre- 
sence of spiritual power. Now, this fact shows 
the necessity of spirit-culture, which is the in- 
tensifying of the power and sovereignty of the 
spirit over the sensuous, — ^the growing into the 
consciousness of spirit-presence ; so that we 
live not in the finite, which is as a narrow line 
stretched before us, but from the depths of the 
infinite, which forms the immeasurable back- 
ground of our being. 

I would repeat again, that the outward, the 
finite, is not opposed to the inward, the infinite ; 
that gives the notion of wrong ; but wrong be- 
gins only in the subjection of the spirit to the 
outward. As the outward can exist only 
through the inward presence, so can the in- 
ward appear only through the outward. The 
finite is holy as it is beautiful ; the human form 
is divine as the heavens^ eating and drinking 



SPIRIT. 15 

as pure and high as the reception of the dew 
by the violet ; and sleeping and waking as 
grand as the waxing anxi waning of the stars. 
The seeking of grace and beauty in what sur- 
rounds our persons and dwellings is as pure as 
the coloring of flowers, and the taste with 
which God softens their bright cheeks by the 
green drapery of leaves ; and laughter, and 
jest, and mcmment, are as innocent as the fan- 
tastic streaks and curves- and convolutions of 
plants and shells. The autward is holy while it 
is subject to the inward. The infinite creates 
and blesses the finite ; but when the sovereign 
spirit becomes a slave, and creeps like a rep^ 
tile under the hedge of the sensuous, then it 
stings and tortures. God uses the finite. See 
the lavish work He makes of colors, forms, 
tints, melodies, on a spring day ; observe the 
pomp and show of His summer festivals ; the 
fairy splendor of His frost-work ; the fitful 
gleams of the white-charioted snow ; that beau- 
tiful enemy, twin-brother of the summer rain. 
Of all beings, God seems most to delight in 
beauty and grandeur ; but when men have 
sought to see Him in these things with the eye, 
and hear Him with the ear, they have sought 
in vain ; because God always transcends his 



16 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

manifestations. He loves the outward, but He 
is always greater than the outward. So spirit- 
culture is not a war upon the finite ; not a des- 
troying, nor contemning, nor underrating of the 
outward ; but an intensifying of the conscious- 
ness of the infinite ; so that we feel ourself a 
living spirit, flowing from the depths of God : 
live, act as sovereign over the outward, and 
so be a continuous reception of inspiration ; 
for God speaks never to the senses : but " it is 
spirit only," as Paul says, '^ that searclieth his 
deep things." 

There is an education of the senses, a train- 
ing of them to perfectness ; and it is invested 
with a great charm. As we pass, in fancy, 
out from the brick walls, narrow streets, and 
interrupted landscape of civilized life, with 
what imposing greatness bursts upon our 
thought, the form of the unadulterated savage, 
with his eye like an eagle's, his ear like the 
startled fawn's, and his step like the panther 
of the wilderness. This is not sensualism, but 
the perfection of the sensuous nature : it is the 
human form in harmony with untroubled 
streams and unbroken forests, — belonging, in 
no mean relation, to the picture that is arched 
by the receding heavens. But, graceful as 



SPIRIT. 17 

power, agility, freedom, are, we instinctively 
feel how low a phase of humanity it is, com- 
pared to the intellectual vigor of the sage or 
the moral princedom of the saint. The ut- 
most perfectness of his well-trained eye and 
ear reveals nought beyond the finite to the 
savage ; his eagle eye, pierce it never so high 
or far, sees not God : but a voice comes, as it 
were, from behind him, — a presence from be« 
neath the outward, and in the infinity w^ithin, 
is revealed the Great Spirit and the land of 
shades beyond the utmost hunting-ground. 

So is there an education which consists in 
the acquisition of facts : it gathers carefully 
the facts in the physical, moral or civil history 
of man, or treasures and collates the pheno- 
mena of the natural world. These studies 
bring into activity what are called the intel- 
lectual powers, — memory, reasoning compari- 
son, &c. ; but it is still but a studying of the 
outward. And such an education may be ela- 
borately conducted, without a distinct recog- 
nition of the infinite element constantly pre- 
sent in man and nature. 

This presence in us of the infinite and un- 
seen is variously called the moral, spiritual or 
religious nature. The name matters little : 



18 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

but it seems to me that many young minds 
cherish great errors respecting its nature and 
province ; greatest of all are those who 
fancy its domain bigoted or narrow. Perhaps 
few of us sufficiently realize that it is from this 
realm within issues our love of the beautiful, 
our reverence for the august, our aspiration for 
the high, our power to do or to forbear. It is the 
birth-piace of genius, the portal of revelation, 
the threshold on which God and man meet. 
Thence comes the perception of the divine in 
the finite, and the emotions that accompany 
such perception, as from the sound of music, 
or the lines of a poem, or the rising of a star. 
Our sense of beauty seems vague and shadow- 
ing off into darkness ; our aspiration is form- 
less and boundless ; our awe like an undefined 
presence ; our afiection like the breaking in of 
fathomless waters ; and thus, because they are 
the stirrings and heavings of a nature that has 
no soundings. Is it worth while to cultivate 
and perfect the consciousness of such a na- 
ture, to lean back on eternity, while the straws 
of time float hither and thither at our feet, to 
live in the centre of God, and feel the beatings 
of the heart of all things ? Is this an inheri- 
tance to be carelessly kept or lightly sacrificed ? 



SPIRIT. 19 

Our consciousness of the inward presence 
is quickened by spiritual communion with 
others, and the study of the books that are the 
highest expression of it. This explains the 
place that the Bible holds in the religious world. 
The Bible is full of bursts of genius, — the ut- 
terance of the living spirit. It has been pro- 
faned, it is yet so, by bigoted usage, and made 
mouldy by superstitious respect. We have 
lost, oh, so much, by the Bible's peculiar and 
isolated position with us. Gemmed all over 
with sublimity and pathos, the choicest of stu- 
dies for the enriching of the imagination as of 
the culture of the heart, too many of us read it, 
from beginning to end, as dry precept or dryer 
fact, — read it from the sense of duty, forsooth, 
and then lay it by, and, for our intellectual 
or poetical culture, enervate our mental vigor 
over volumes whose eloquence ofttimes is but 
the weakened reflection of the flashing genius 
of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Bible writers 
are men who talked with God as the true soul 
always talked with Him. Does not the infinite 
reality and transcendent purity of the God- 
head so fill the soul of Isaiah, that the posts of 
the temple seem to move with awe at its 
presence, and the house to be filled with 



20 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the incense smoke of worship ? Let us then 
not slight companionship with such men, thei^ 
poets of God : much knew they, for they looked" 
through " the shows of things ;" their influ- 
ence may quicken our mental vision. Our 
questions about ourselves, what we are, and 
what we have to do, must be answered in the 
wide domain of spirit. In the soul, God re- 
veals himself to man ; it is the door into the 
infinite presence, once opened, never shut : 
deep questions must be answered by deep 
thoughts. As we live from the spirit, so flows 
the spirit upon us, and the soul becomes the 
everlasting son, the continual recipient of God. 



TRUTH. 



In analyzing nature and man, we recognised 
the existence of spirit, or reality, in every 
thing which appears. That of appearances 
the senses take note; but spirit, or reality, 
can only be perceived by spirit. Now, in our 



TRUTH. 21 

question. What is Truth ? what mean we than 
what is the reality of things ? In every rela- 
tion of events, every statement of opinion, 
every phenomena, we seek to find the reality 
of it, apart from its appearance merely. We, 
embodied spirits, surrounded by a world of ap- 
pearances, are driven by instinctive desire to find 
our like, — to seize on and appropriate Truth. 
We hear it often said. Truth is the object of the 
soul's search. Perhaps the query has come 
up. Why is this ? What is the secret of this 
invincible love of truth, that will not let me 
rest, knowingly, in error or mere seeming ? 
Why does the child say so early of ought that 
is told it, Is it true ? — and the sage, on the 
threshold of Heaven, still says. Show me 
Truth ? It is, it seems to me, because we, as 
spirits, being reality ourselves, we do instinc- 
tively seek our like. Spirit seeks spirit in all 
things, to assimilate it unto itself. It is grieved, 
indignant, at the presence of deception, false- 
hood, because it is the thrusting upon it of ap- 
pearance for reality. Truth is literally the 
food of the soul : for this was it born, and for 
this cause came it into the world, to bear wit- 
ness to the truth. Truth, primal, absolute, 
S 



22 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

is the aim and object of search ; but we al- 
ways receive it in portions, — always meet it in 
forms. God is absolute reality, primal exist- 
ence ; but He reveals himself through reason, 
through conscience, through nature. We do 
not meet Him face to face. Try to conceive of 
Him, we cannot ; try to comprehend Him, we 
cannot ; try to conceive of pure existence, in- 
finite, formless, eternal, — the greatest human 
intellect reels beneath it. So true are the 
Bible's words, that " no man can see God and 
live." The soul demands to see Him ; it be- 
comes impatient, and would pass the limits of 
its humanity to see Him. Though He has made 
a law, under which alone He is revealed, yet 
would it break these bounds. 

'•' For light Uke tliis, 
Who would not dare to die !" 

The same truth is repeated in bold personi- 
fications, in the story in which Moses requests 
a personal interview with God. We some- 
times say, What is God ? We long to fathom 
his breadth and depth : but He says, This can- 
not be: if the finite could comprehend the 
infinite, it would cease to be finite. Man, in 
comprehending God, would cease to be man : 
but my goodness shall flow in and around thee, 



TRUTH. 23 

and in the depth of thy own affections, is re- 
vealed the God of love, and through thy dis- 
criminating justice shalt thou learn of the God 
of right : for close by me I will keep thee, as it 
were, in the cleft of a rock, and although upon 
thee I lay the conditions of the finite, so that 
my incomprehensible essence annihilate thee 
not, yet thro' the uplifted veil of reason and 
conscience shall I be revealed to thee, tho' my 
infinity may not be beholden. 

We cannot comprehend God. We had bet- 
ter give that up at once. Into us He descends, 
a ceaseless tide of being, but we cannot get be- 
hind to overlook it ; but in the fact of His in- 
finity consists the inexhaustible nature of truth. 
We are learners forever. 

We receive Truth under limitations : this 
must necessarily be so, and Progress consists 
in the continually passing from the form of 
truth \ye hold to a higher and wider form. 
The forms of truth are opinion : these forms 
must always be limitations of the truth, and 
true growth is the passing from one of these 
forms to another, which other shall not oppose 
or contradict the former, but enclose and trans- 
cend it : so that it is never new truth we attain 
unto, but necessarily higher forms of the old, 



24 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

eternal truth, which knows no " beginning of 
days nor length of years." 

We say to a little child, that heaven or hap- 
piness is the reward of virtue. This is an eter- 
nal truth, tho' his fancy gives to his notion 
of heaven the accompaniments of waving 
flowers and cool streams : by-and-by, the 
heart begins to feel the conflict of virtue and 
sin : it resolves, resists, conquers, and the joy 
of a good conscience is heaven : and so on, un- 
til the heroes of the spirit tell us that virtue is 
itself heaven. Now the eternal truth remains 
the same. Heaven is always the hope of glory, 
whether it be the glory of the outward or that 
of the spirit made perfect through suffering. 

Truth is a seed, wrapt round in opinion : it 
grows, it swells, it bursts its successive rinds, 
yet each one encloses the last, like the bark of 
a tree ; but all the former are rejected because 
the ever-loving sap of life has overflowed their 
bounds. 

Let us cling to truth ; nor pause and falter 
in the demand for it : it is literally our life : 
but let us realize that our present opinion is 
never ultimate. But if we are true and free, 
by-and-by we shall lay it aside, and it will be 
to us an appearance only from which the re- 



TRUTH. 25 

ality has gone forth to seek new form. The 
manna must be gathered every day. Woe to 
them who think to feed on the morrow with the 
food of the past. This conviction may serve 
to banish all bigotry, all conceit. All men 
hold truth, though under vast variety of forms : 
all immortal spirits must possess some portion 
of truth, however small, for spirit lives only on 
spirit ; and however overlaid by the sensuous, 
if a spark of immortal life linger in the being, 
it lives on divine nourishment. That which is 
to any soul actually the principle of life, is the 
same truth that gives vitality to every other 
soul. God reflects himself in infinite ways, 
but it is the same light that burns aloft in the 
star, or glistens far down in the recesses of the 
mine. All human beings are children of one 
mother : that cannot be food to one which is 
poison to another, but the same nutriment 
serves for all. Opinions then are necessarily 
perishing, because they are the forms truth 
takes in individual minds : they are dependent 
often on organization, always upon the mental 
and moral character of the individual. The 
forcing of any one's opinion upon another is an 
act of tyranny. The desire to do so is wishing . 
to make a slave of one's brother : we seek to 
2* 



26 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

quicken a soul to truth, but the truth must come 
to that soul in its own form, not in ours : if the 
divine energy desgended, we should not care, 
were we not bigots, whether it came, like a 
tongue of flame, or in the likeness of the dew 
of heaven. Forms of truth, which are ad- 
dressed to the imagination, or to the instincts 
of the universal heart, are most enduring. 
Forms of the imagination are infinitely elastic : 
woven of viewless air, yet they compose a tex- 
ture so impervious that truth is often borne 
down in them from age to age. Of this kind 
is the Genius of the Bible. In the passage to 
which we referred above, the same thought 
was in Moses's mind as in ours at this moment, 
as in the boy at school when he knows that the 
less cannot contain the greater ; that the soul 
cannot come into possession of absolute truth, 
which is the being of God ; but that God re- 
veals himself to man partially, and, as it were, 
by degrees : the same truth expressed in a 
boldly imaginative relation : the eternal facts 
of the infinite and finite assume form and con- 
verse together ; and the infinite denies itself to 
the finite, yet promises to be always with it. 



LAW AND LOVE. 27 



LAW AND LOVE. 

What do we mean by Revelation ? Know- 
ledge imparted of things, not recognisable by 
the senses. By the word Revelation, we ac- 
knowledge that there is a veil over such things, 
and this veil is to be put back or taken away : 
that these lie not in utter obscurity, but are 
veiled. Now these veiled objects are truths of 
the spirit, — realities. What we see, touch, 
and hear, is a veil : the veil of appearance over 
the reality behind it, that we do not see, or at 
least discern but imperfectly. We would have 
this veil lifted : we would know what lies be- 
hind it : we demand revelation. Now what 
veils the spiritual world to us ? Obviously ap- 
pearances, impressions, the sensuous, the out- 
ward ; and so the more we are absorbed in the 
transitory, the passing, by vanity, ambition, 
any love or mode of life that has the outward 
for its end and aim, so much thicker is the 
veil that hides from us the eternal ; for these 
modes and forms of life is the very veil itself 



28 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

that conceals the sublime reality behind them. 
God, Truth, Reality, lie sun-like near us, but 
shine dimly upon us, because the veil of the 
outward interposes like a fog between us and 
them. 

Now it follows necessarily from this, that 
those who are least thralls to the outward fact 
discern most clearly the inward truth. Their 
veil is thinned. To the dwellers in the spirit 
the veil of the senses becomes transparent ; 
they see truth, and tell what they see, and we 
receive what they tell and call it a revelation. 
Now these truths must be equally near to us ; 
only the veil is more or less thick over our 
moral vision. Must it not be so ? Can God 
be nearer to one soul than another ? The 
consciousness of his nearness varies greatly, 
but if he be infinitely near to each must he not 
be equally near to all ? His omnipresence 
cannot admit of degrees : as he encloses every- 
where he cannot be more in one place than 
another. We lie in his immensity, as the bird 
floats in the surrounding sun-light. He can- 
not be nearer to one than another, though we 
differ widely in our consciousness of this near- 
ness. The veil of the outward comes between 
our consciousness and him, so that he is hid : 



LAW AND LOVE. 29 

we are in the bosom of the Father, yet He is not 
unveiled-— re vealed . 

Now must not all revelation be one, and that 
the unveiling of the real, the spirit, the good — 
God ? We cannot say, for instance, that one 
came by Moses, and one by Jesus ; for there 
can be but one subject of revelation-^God or 
Truth ; btit various- forms and degrees of it. 
To Moses, God was revealed as law, — to Jesus, 
as free favor : to the one under the idea of 
sovereign Justice,-^to the other as condescend- 
ing love ; to the one was he Jehovah, — to the 
other, Father. But though the form thus 
varied, the great reality could not vary, and 
not in the revelation, but in the recipient, was 
the difference. Neither, if both were true, 
could Jesus abolish or supersede that of his pre- 
decessor : the revelation of the one is eternal 
as that of the other ; Moses and Jesus both saw 
truth ; but Jesus, from the greater width and 
depth of his spiritual experience. Was let into a 
truth, that absorbed and transcended that of 
Moses. Moses might not perhaps recognise 
the truth of Jesus, though Jesus would set his 
seal to that of Moses, for he who holds a higher 
truth can recognise its lower forms ; but the 
possessor of the lower cannot discern the higher, 



30 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

— like two men ascending a mountain, one 
mid-way says, — I see streams and plains, and 
dwellings, and a gentle range of hills environ- 
ing the whole ; but the one on the summit ex- 
claims, — I see all that you do ; but instead of 
your range of hills bounding the whole, there 
is another and nobler range enclosing these. 
Different views depend on different position. 
According to this spiritual position is a man's 
revelation : stands he higher he overlooks the 
lower : the truth he once deemed ultimate is 
found to be only the foreground of another and 
wider. 

Unto Moses the veil of the senses, of appear- 
ances, was lifted : he too looked through the 
" shows of things," and saw that, behind the 
outward, which makes the outward what it is. 
To his earnest and manly soul was revealed the 
truth, that man is not free, but bound, that he 
cannot do as he would, but as he must ; that he 
is not free to do wrong, but bound to right by a 
triple chain of pain and fear : he saw and felt 
the presence of penalty : that God had attach- 
ed pain to certain courses of action, and plea- 
sure to other and quite opposite courses ; and 
that this was law, from which man could not 
get away : that fire would burn and water 



LAW AND LOVE. 31 

drown, that sin would bring evil and remorse, 
and let man try hard as he might, he could not 
make it so that fire would not burn nor water 
drown, nor intemperance of the body destroy 
the soul : he stood awed before the majesty of 
Law. And how great was that revelation ! 

We talk of the revelation of Jesus, and many 
of us have not come up to that given by Moses, 
How few of us realize the constant action of an 
Eternal Law,which man's mightiest efforts can- 
not repeal : how we all seek at some or another 
time to elude this terrible Presence. Myriads 
think by some possibility to rid themselves of 
it, — to neglect duty and yet have the rewards 
of duty : men recognise law outside of them : 
know that the heavy will fall ; that the light 
will float ; that on the swallowed poison dis- 
ease or death will ensue ; and yet dream of 
evading the action of the same law, by which 
misery clings to vice, and happiness radiates 
from virtue. We are so enveloped and ab- 
sorbed in shadows, that we at last believe that 
every thing is a shadow which can easily be 
dodged aside, and do not see the great rock of 
reality against which we beat in vain. We 
hope to be idle without being ignorant ; to be 
selfish without being self-tormented ; to be sen- 



32 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

sual without being robbed of spirit ; and yet 
law is inviolable : the path of God is straight 
as a cannon ball's : it turns not aside for our 
regrets or wishes. What we sow we reap, 
says Paul : the action that we do, its weight 
we must bear : the fault of to-day brings forth 
its fruit in the failure of to-morrow. Can the 
guilty enter into the bliss of the innocent ? can 
the drunkard have the clear eye and firm hand 
of the temperate ? can the vain woman assume 
the serenity and dignity of her who possesses 
her own kingdom in peace ? No, law is invio- 
lable. Sublime and fearful is the hour to every 
one when in peculiar vividness it is revealed to 
the soul. We need not consult the experience 
of Moses to learn of its terrible grandeur : the 
smoking mount : the tempest of thunder and 
lightning, are but the outward picturings of a 
scene that is laid in the inward life of each: the 
accompaniments of a great drama, that goes on 
with more or less vividness within every indi- 
vidual. We have been present at the giving of 
the law. We cannot do as we will, but as 
we must. We sometimes wish that it was not 
so difficult to be good — not so hard to be 
learned. We wish that we could be self-in- 
dulgent and yet be good for all that, that we 



LAW AND LOVE. 33 

could idle off our time and yet be learned for 
all that ; but the law that attaches virtue to 
discipline, learning to intellectual toil, we 
cannot abrogate : we shrink like weak children 
before its sovereignty : it seems to issue from 
a great height above us : it utters its voice in 
thunders : we bow before the Mount Sinai in 
our souls. 

The law came by Moses : serious, severe, 
majestic Moses. No wonder he seems to us 
grave, even to sternness. The recognition of 
law is always a serious and stern experience, 
revealed in its fulness it is terrific and unspar- 
ing, the most fearful of interviews with God. 
God sovereign, and man subject. All pass 
through it, more or less consciously, more or 
less fully. Many linger forever at the foot of 
the mount ; they perceive the thunderings and 
the lightnings, but hear no voice : they know 
not that there is a higher revelation than law, 
and that is Love. Is law and love then op- 
posed ? 4Ko, for Truth cannot contradict it- 
self: but love is highest law. Jesus ascended 
the spiritual height, farther than Moses : the 
impassable mountain-ridge of law, that seemed 
ultimate to the latter, became in the experience 
3 



34 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

of the former fused in the embracing atmos- 
phere of love. 

But to attain the position of Jesus, we must 
first have stood in the line with Moses. If 
God is to us law, we must be faithful to that 
revelation before we receive its completion in 
love. We must fulfil law to our utmost en- 
deavor before the fulness of time comes, for the 
higher revelation : that is, if we are lax and 
easy, and comfort ourselves, by saying, that 
God is not a sovereign but a Father, we 
must remember that to be faithless to the 
first revelation is no way to receive the 
second, and that unless we are faithful 
subjects we can never become free chil- 
dren : unless we obey God, as a law-giver, 
only as a law-preserver will He announce him- 
self to us, and never as the Father. Jesus, as 
the most obedient servant, became the best be- 
loved son : through faithfulness to law he 
transcended law, and lived in the bosom of free 
love. il 

This revelation of love is the highest we can 
attain unto : law is revealed in the sense of 
necessity, of obligation ; it is often sublime, 
always stern, and this sternness, this unloveli- 
ness, so appalling to the heart, is the sense of 



LAW AND LOVE. 35 

separateness it gives of man from God, of op- 
position between the two. God seems on one 
side and the soul on the other : there is a gulf 
between us and Him. We feel that it is harsh 
and unlovely, and this feeling is the instinct of 
the soul demanding a higher revelation : that 
this gulf be filled up : that the soul find itself 
at home in God, on the same side with him, 
one with him. The sense of obligation to a 
being outside of us is always oppressive : it is 
the presence of a master, however lightly felt ; 
it is the abhorred weight of a chain, and the in- 
stinct of the soul is for freedom, — for freedom 
rather than life ; far down in the inward spirit of 
man lies the principle by which he will die sooner 
than be a slave, for the wildest range of the 
sea-breeze is not so free as the soul insists on 
being : thence its earnest and ofttimes perplex- 
ing question how to reconcile law with liberty ? 
thence its problem how to be free in law ; and 
this question is answered and problem solved 
in the revelation of the truth, that God and man 
are not opposite to each other as sovereign and 
subject : but that the soul is one with God, in 
oneness of nature, the flowing forth from him, 
the son of the Father, so that truth and right is 
its native direction : in obeying God, it obeys 



36 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

itself: in fulfilling his law it fulfils its own, 
from the fact that there is no division between 
it and him, but oneness of life ; and this reve- 
lation of oneness is the revelation of love. 
Love is spontaneous, springs from unity : 
spirit recognises itself under all forms, and 
through love seeks reunion : the soul seeks 
truth, beauty, goodness, from the instinctive 
impulse that springs from unity of nature. Se- 
paration from them is pain and wrong, and 
sense of utmost need. In the fact that the 
soul is one in its nature with God, that it is the 
everlasting son of the everlasting Father, is all 
division of will, all diverseness of interests, 
all arbitrariness on one side and obligatoriness 
on the other, done away : law vanishes in love ; 
this is the reconciliation in the son. Then 
does the soul no longer hear a voice above it, 
compelling it, a power mightier than itself, that 
it must obey out of sheer weakness to resist, 
but it feels itself the child, heir of all things, 
goes forth to take possession of its own inheri- 
tance of Truth and Goodness out of free will 
and spontaneous action. The secret of the 
soul's feeling of obligation to the true and right, 
is explained in this oneness of its being with 



LAW AND LOVE. 37 

that to whieh it aspires : the cause of the sense 
of duty is laid bare in the revelation of love. 

The revelation of the relation the infinite 
sustains to the finite, under any form, is grand 
and awful ; the conception of the infinite in 
its sovereignty over the finite, the great incom- 
prehensible reality, the being of all beings, 
may well call upon the imagination for its 
most fearful pictures : the earth is said to 
quake at his coming, the mountains to smoke : 
man, the finite, shrinks shudderingly before the 
presence of the Infinite : he says, " Let not 
God speak to us, lest we die;" but to feel one's 
self at home in God, not outside, nor apart nor 
even below, but one in Him — this is the bridge 
that was wanting to unite the finite and infi- 
nite ; the former is not opposed to the latter ; 
but the finite is son to the infinite, proceeding 
forth forever from its bosom. Grand as is 
this latter revelation, its grandeur is soft and 
beautiful, not terrible ; its sublimity is hidden 
from us by its afFectionateness. Seeing God, 
as Father, the radiance of the infinite is soft- 
ened : we become children, and worship with- 
out fear, and yet this is the sublimest thing of 
all, that the soul can say, father to the infinite, 
3* 



88 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

incomprehensible, with such a joyous rever- 
ence, and only from the fact of its oneness, its 
sonship, could this be possible. 

We are no longer servants, but children ; 
loving truth, beauty, goodness, out of the freest 
impulse of our being, and repeating them in 
action from the same sweet necessity. 

How appropriately is a revelation like this 
emblemed by the singing of angels and the 
rising of a star. These exquisite pictures re- 
present facts in the inward life. The con- 
sciousness of God as Father always seems to 
come with a sound like the chorus of angels ; 
and the felt reality of his indwelling presence 
is as the rising of a wonderful star, throwing 
the brightness of its rays directly across the 
path upon which we are to go. 



GRACE. 



The principle of voluntary obedience was re- 
vealed in and through Jesus Christ. This is a pe- 



GRACE. 39 

culiar characteristic of Jesus' mission ; volunta- 
ry obedience, not obedience to a prescribed law 
because we must, but obedience to it, because 
we love it, choose it, are one with it ; because 
in obeying it, we act out ourselves. We love 
natural acts and words ; we admire spon- 
taneity, freedom, but we do not sufficiently 
realize how sacred nature is : we talk of sub- 
duing, overcoming nature, and put an idea of 
duty, of forced obedience in its place : this 
latter may have a place in religious culture, 
but it is not its perfection : the highest religious 
state is when we act rightly, as the bird sings ; 
when we are pure, generous, self-forgetting, 
from the action of the same energetic impulse, 
that the flower is streaked, colored, and fringed ; 
when the outward life flows from the inward 
life, as the stream from the fountain, as light 
from its source. We know that actions are 
not virtue, that even virtuous actions are not 
virtue : they are the blossomings of virtue, the 
putting forth of the energy of the soul, in ac- 
cordance with its law, which is virtue. The 
law of the soul is ascent : it gravitates up- 
wards ; we may say, it is more aerial, than 
any thing we can see or touch, and so it ne- 
cessarily ascends, ^as smoke and flame, heat 
and sound, ascend. 



40 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

It is not what we do, but what we are, that 
makes us virtuous, and this is what Paul means, 
when he says, "By grace ye are saved, not by 
works.'' This truth has been obscured to us 
by the errors and cant that have accompanied 
it ; but stated in simplicity, we all accept it : 
we all feel and acknowledge, that what we do, 
apart from what we are, does not make us 
good, does not save us, but only just so far as 
we become good, are we saved ; goodness saves 
nothing else ; saves from pain, from discord, 
from destruction ; and what is goodness in the 
soul, but the presence of God, and so, what 
saves in the last analysis, but God himself? 
By the free action of the living spirit are we 
saved : by faith in the soul, as the born of God, 
the sovereign of all things are we saved ; this 
faith being the fountain from whence the works 
flow. We cannot live spiritually without 
faith in the spiritual : faith is the mother of 
action. The universality of worldliness arises 
from this want of conviction of the presence 
and sovereignty of spirit : we believe in ease, 
self-indulgence, praise, glitter, — believe in the 
happiness they afford ; we see and know them 
to be real, but the happiness of mental and 
moral discipline, of patient and self- forgetting 



GRACE. 41 

virtue, the happiness flowing from the sove- 
reignty of the spirit over the outward, we do 
not believe in ; the reality of spirit we do not 
believe ; of its supremacy we have no convic- 
tion ; how then can we fail of being sensual ? 
Alms deeds without number, religious services 
multiplied to infinity ; how can they possibly 
give spiritual life to one who has no absolute 
conviction of, or faith in spirit itself? And this 
seems to be the great object of Jesus to estab- 
lish faith in spirit, as the primal, sovereign 
element in which we move : salvation by grace, 
or the presence of God in the soul : salvation 
by goodness, in, for, and by itself — not of 
works, but goodness from whence good works 
flow. 

When Moses announced the law, he an- 
nounced a great truth ; but it became overlaid 
with error. Religion came to consist in out- 
ward obedience to law ; in works alone, and 
these, instead of being signs of life, were sub- 
stituted for life itself. Moses said, " Remem- 
ber the Sabbath-day, and keep it holy, for the 
Lord has sanctified it :'' this was beautiful 
and true, as Moses uttered it ; time is to be 
kept holy, for the presence of the Eternal hal- 
lows it : but the Jews in Jesus' time hallowed 



42 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

not the day through the presence of holy feel- 
iug, but did the work for the work's sake : 
they made a merit of the mere fact of its 
separateness which caused Jesus to protest, 
that man was not made for the Sabbath, but 
the Sabbath for man, that the soul did not ex- 
ist for the sake of keeping the Sabbath holy, 
but the Sabbath was to be holy for the sake of 
the soul, that time is consecrate, because the 
eternal passes through it. So Paul says, " That 
by the deeds of the law, shall no man living be 
justified." Paul absolutely makes no terms 
with works good or bad : he went so far, that 
James seems to have felt it incumbent, in his 
letters, to prove the necessity of the former. 
Paul, like all ardent persons, in stating one 
side of a truth very forcibly, might possibly 
have been unjust to the other side ; but the 
great fact of the necessity of inward life so 
filled his mind, that he was out of all manner 
of patience with the Jews, because they went 
to the synagogue and made a merit of it, took 
part in the solemn rites of the temple, fasted, 
prayed, and paid tithes, and because they did 
these outside things, thought themselves very 
religious, while they had neither devotion nor 
abstinence, nor petition, nor love in their souls, 



GRACE. 43 

' — SO he declares, that these things they did were 
nothing, absolutely nothing ; by obedience to 
them, he says, " Shall no man, that lives, be 
justified :" and instead of your being better for 
these observances, ye are not so, for ye are 
sinners like every body else. 

What Paul says in his ardent and indignant 
way, Jesus states in an equally energetic, but 
far more majestic and serene mode : it is the 
central thought of the sermon on the mount ; 
not the life, but heart, condemns or saves ; in- 
deed, all his teachings are but the amplifica- 
tions of his one great revelation, that the pre- 
sence of goodness in the soul is salvation and 
redemption ; that every thing in God's world 
works from within, outward ; that we do lovely 
and beautiful and good actions, because there 
is loveliness and goodness in the soul ; that 
actions are not life, but the signs of life ; that 
they are the putting forth of the inward spirit, 
as flowers are the putting forth of the beauty 
in God's mind : their tints and streaks, and al- 
most escaping hues, seeming the struggle or 
effort to embody in the finite, elements of beau- 
ty, almost too refined and ethereal to be so 
embodied. We seem to see in some flowers, 
not what they are, but what they cannot be ; 



44 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

they are, as it were, the coarser pencillings 
adapted to our coarse organs, and so actions of 
a good spirit are the embodyings in the finite 
of the infinite goodness passing through it. It 
would be a startling question for some of us, 
who profess ourselres lovers of nature, to ask 
how far our lives are written in beauty ? As 
we day after day put off from us, feelings, 
and words, and acts, is it, as if we left behind 
us, moss-roses and mignonette, bird-singing or 
the diamond drops of summer rain ? And yet 
this were the natural consequence, were true 
beauty and harmony within. 

All reformation in religion is this remand* 
ing of it back to its place in the heart : and 
this is done more or less forcibly, as the re- 
formation is more or less thorough. All re- 
formation outside of us, in the great history of 
Christianity, and within, in our individual ex- 
perience, is this one thing, — the getting back to 
the soul itself, its motives, wishes, principles, 
as the fountain of action. Moses taught the 
ancient Israelites, do thus and thus for God's 
sake, because God commands : that is right, 
it is acting for God's sake, not for the work's 
sake ; by-and-by, the Hebrew piety declines, 
and they pray and fast, and frequent the tern- 



GRACE. 45 

pie, not out of love to God, but for the sake of 
the works themselves ; the works become 
greater than the soul. Such a state of things 
always calls for the reformer, and Jesus rose, 
and like every other reformer before or since, 
taught, that works in themselves are dead, — the 
spirit only gives life. He depreciates fasting — 
why fast ? he says — fast in the soul ; he speaks 
carelessly of the Jewish Sabbath, — man is 
greater than the Sabbath ; he is quite indif- 
ferent where people worship, whether at Mount 
Gerizim or at Jerusalem, and tells the Sa- 
maritan woman that all places are alike. 
There is one great idea in his mind, that life 
is in the soul ; that what the man is himself, 
is the great question, not where he is, nor what 
he does, for the good tree will bring forth good 
fruit. The Apostles take up the same princi- 
ple, and the way in which they declaim against 
works, and the deeds of the law, has given rise 
to a vast amount of controversy ; but if we go to 
it, in our own simplicity, as children would go, 
without preconceived notions of any kind, with- 
out perplexing ourselves with names and au- 
thorities, we shall find that it is what we all 
believe, what we all insist upon, and most 
earnestly, in our best moments. Some, indeed, 
4 



46 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

from a partial view of the subject, may say^. 
What ! is it of no consequence what we do 1 
are good and kind deeds of no avail ? are 
temperance and fortitude, and generosity and 
compassion, of no worth ? Of infinite worth, 
answers the universal heart, but so only as 
they come from within : only as true and gen- 
uine expressions of the living soul, does kind- 
ness win, does heroism thrill us. Is not pre- 
tence utterly base to us ? is not the hypocrite 
the one unblessed being in God's world — the 
Judas of the universe ? Alas, touch him, 
even the hypocrite, with a gentle hand, for he 
bows beneath a more than Atlas-burden — God 
and all nature are against him. 

Jesus saw the infinite worth of the soul for 
itself, and that all other things are subordinate 
to and expressive of it. Paul saw this too, but 
less clearly, and so his teachings are less sin- 
gle and impressive. Gradually came, what is 
called the corruption of Christanity : men 
multiplied outward works, prayers, fasts, and 
feast-days, and penances, to such a degree, that 
it seems, as if the soul was quite lost sight of; 
and Luther rose, and it is interesting to see, 
that of all Paul's doctrines this was his fa- 
vorite. " By grace ye are saved, not by works :" 



^GRACE. 47 

these burdensome weights of prayers and pen- 
ances are worthless, says Luther, man is saved 
by the grace of God ; this is the truth, more 
or less clearly announced by all reformers — the 
presence of the soul, the only saving principle 
— the language in which it is clothed, changes 
with every age, but the great truth remains 
the same. Jesus, from the heights of his moral 
sublimity, says, *' The kingdom of heaven is 
within you ; all things are possible to him that 
believeth." Paul, great, but far below Jesus, 
declares. Ye are justified by faith, not by 
works. Luther quotes Paul, and says, You 
cannot buy heaven by penances and pilgrim- 
ages ; it comes of God's grace, and the re- 
form of the present day is the ascent, it seems 
to me, to the platform of Jesus : it says. Be a 
living soul, and then all your words and acts 
will have vitality and worth. Have love, truth, 
holiness, beauty, within, and they may be put 
forth in myriad acts, and all shall be fair and 
good. A person with overflowing religious 
sentiment may express it through all the mul- 
tiplied rites of Catholicism, and each shall have 
significance and beauty, or it may be mani- 
fested in an altogether different way ; and that 
way, if it be the arrangement of a dwelling or 



48 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the setting of a blade of grass, shall be a re- 
ligious act, from the fact, that the spirit gives 
character to the act, and not the reverse. 

We say, that we must act from pure motive, 
or the act is worthless ; that religious services 
are of no avail, only as the expression of re- 
ligious sentiment ; that time and place are 
nothing, for so God is worshipped, it matters 
not whether it be at Jerusalem or Mount Geri- 
zim ; but we need not imagine, that we are 
saying any new thing. Old Isaiah, three thou- 
sand years ago, said the same : your new 
moons, and assemblies, and Sabbaths, and 
solemn meetings, my soul hateth ; and why 
so ? because they had become forms, mere 
outsides from whence the spirit had retreated. 
So eternally is the great truth repeated, that 
spirit only saves ; so much soul we have, so 
much do we live — no more, no less ; its pre- 
sence makes life hearty, earnest, rich, godlike : 
its absence leaves life, hollow, false, earthly. 
What we have to aspire unto, is to live wholly, 
completely with all the energy of the soul, 
under the conviction that the outward is but 
the medium of the soul's expression, that cir- 
cumstances are the forms of life, not life it- 
self; that God made man first a living soul— 



GRACE. 49 

and being such, he creates around him a di- 
vine life. We do not live wholly, genuinely, 
but partially, as the poet Isaiah says, ^^ There 
is dross with our silver, our wine is mixed with 
water ;" the silver of the soul is to be worked 
pure from its alloy, the wine of life is to be 
separated from the water of falseness, that di- 
lutes and flattens ; we are bound, each in our 
way, to make men feel that God is in us, that 
the revelation of grace and truth comes by us, 
and that where the action of the living spirit 
isj there is salvation and immortality. 



BAPTISMAL. 

Reformers always protest against things as 
they are : they would go to the beginning and 
make things over anev/ ; and true reformation 
is, as we have seen, this going back to the liv- 
ing soul, and making life over from within 
outwards. This is the only genuine mode, and 
it explains many difficulties in moral culture ; 
4* 



50 



STUDIES IN EELIGION. 



most persons, when very young, perhaps later, 
if endowed with devotional temperament, and 
aspirations after a pure and holy life, will re- 
peatedly form to themselves, resolutions and 
rules of some detail in character and action, 
for the correction of faults and attainment of 
virtues. Is indolence or selfishness a besetting 
sin ? Then does the young religionist lay out 
plans of industry, and form resolutions of dis- 
interestedness ; but the plans, however saga- 
cious, and the resolves however stout, are 
almost uniformly the first to be overset and 
vanquished : all nature seems to conspire 
against them; the easiest thing in the world 
it is to break resolutions, the severest of toil to 
work up to a rule from the outside ; but let 
there be infused into the heart an intense in- 
terest in some study or occupation, and little 
need is there of fortifications against idleness : 
mental and physical enei'gy outstrips resolve — 
the sunlight is anticipated, and the stars out- 
watched — life is made over, is recreated by a 
present energy of thought and feeling ; or let 
the soul be kindled with a glowing affection, 
and rules against selfishness become obsolete ; 
love laughs them to scorn : it nourishes itself 
on self-sacrifice as a God feeding on nectar. 



BAPTISMAL. 51 

and burns the more intensely, the more of its 
own life it gives away. 

All thorough reformation of life springs 
from this revivifying of the inward spirit ; but 
there seems to be a reformation less radical 
than this, which has its own worth, a reforma- 
tion that falls upon action at the outset, and 
says, leave off this and that bad habit, as a 
condition of greater good. Repent, because 
the kingdom of heaven is at hand : reform, in 
order to be able to receive this kingdom. 

Somewhat of this nature was the reforma- 
tion preached by John the Baptist ; the puri- 
fying of the outward life, as a condition of the 
reception of spiritual truth : for instance, if 
we wished to recall a poor drunkard, bloated 
and miserable with excess, to a consciousness 
of higher life, we should naturally say to him, 
Leave off this habit, first of all ; and so to any or 
to ourselves, in the indulgence of any manifest 
wrong, as John said to the extortioners, Extort 
no more, — and to the soldiers. Do violence no 
more. This is the baptism of water — we reform 
the outside as a step — we pass through the 
baptism of water or of entire temperance and 
regularity in the outward, as a necessary pre- 
liminary to the baptism of fire, which is the 



52 STUDIES IN RELIGION. ^ 

reception of the Holy Ghost. John Baptist's 
mission is appropriately named the mission of 
preparation : all reforms that have the out- 
ward for their object, more or less, are of this 
kind ; the reformed inebriate is an advanced 
man, but not necessarily a saint, neither is the 
abstinent in food, because of his abstinence ; 
that is, highest temperance in the outward 
does not of itself bring spiritual attainment, 
though absolutely essential to it. All such 
reforms are the baptism of water unto repen- 
tance, beautiful in their place, but that is not 
the highest ; there is also a baptism of fire, 
which is the intensifying of the inner spirit, 
and this it is which so recreates our life, that 
we are new creatures. 

As there is a puriiication of the outward as 
the necessary condition, for the inspirations of 
thought and feeling, so there seems to be 
analogous preparations going on in the inner 
life, previous to the reception of new truth. 
We are continually putting o^ as a condition 
of receiving. We are liable to think, that 
every step we take in truth is to be the last. 
When men heard the earnest words of John 
the Baptiser, they said to him. Art thou the 
Christ ? Men seem always looking for a pro- 



BAPTISMAL* 53 

phet who shall give the final revelation, after 
whom there shall come no other ; they na- 
turally ask every reformer, Art thou the 
Christ ? Art thou anointed, authorized to 
teach? Art thou the ultimate standard, to 
whom we shall go ? The same question was 
put later to Jesus. Art thou he, that shall 
come ? John replies with great self-knowledge, 
to the above question, I am not the anointed, 
the ultimate ; I am but the preparer for a 
higher. So is it in the soul : every revela- 
tion is a preparation for that which is to come. 
As in the outward world, every great reformer 
is preceded by a less, — a Jesus by a John, — who 
makes straight the path for his successor, so 
within us, is every truth the preparer for a 
higher, every improvement in thought and feel- 
ing, a stepping-stone to higher improvement. 
We rise by successive gradations. The soul 
passes not from the night of ignorance or sin, 
into the noon-day of wisdom ; but as without, 
there is first the dawn, then the morning, then 
the increasing light into meridian brightness. 
The more we observe nature, the more we find 
that every state appears a preparation for what 
shall come after ; the bud exists to mature its 
leaf, the leaves to assist in the developement of 



54 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the flower ; the flower for the seed ; all cre- 
ation is a looking forward ; and so does the 
instinct of the human heart direct ever to 
somewhat that shall come. How deep-laid is 
the hope of the future, in man : what a treasury 
is it of all the heart covets ; and this is true of 
all, the thinking and unthinking, the glad and 
the sorry ; all have a to-morrow and to-morrow, 
and man's dream of heaven is but the to- 
morrow of human life. In vain, the old tell 
the young, that the future will disappoint; every 
new soul feels itself an untried power ; to- 
morrow is always a possibility. Partaking of 
this incessant hope, every-where betrayed in 
nature, and repeated in the instinct of youth, 
we should hold our highest state but as the 
preparation for a higher ; old habits of think- 
ing, accustomed and pleasant associations, are 
to be laid aside, as the new truth descends into 
the soul, like fire, gathering what there is of 
wheat in thought and life, into the garner of 
immortality, and consuming what is extraneous 
and hurtful. 



INSIGHT. 5^ 



INSIGHT. 

John says of Jesus, that there was a time 
when he knew him not : knew not that he was 
the anointed, the Christ, the needed one, the 
only ; he had not yet appreciated his cousin's 
genius. And how had he at last discovered 
it ? He says, that '^ He, who had sent him to 
baptise with water, the same said unto him, 
that upon whom he should see the spirit de- 
scend and remain, was He which baptised 
with the Holy Ghost." Who was this testifier 
to John of Jesus' superiority ? According to 
his own account, it was the spiritual impulse, 
what we call sentiment of duty, or movement 
of benevolence, that had urged John himself 
forth, to the work of reforming the world. If 
his conviction of truth, he argues, was suffi- 
cient to send him on the baptism of prepara- 
tion, how much higher influences must he 
exert upon men, in whom this spirit dwelt with 
fulness and power ? It was sufficient to John, 
that he knew Jesus was greatly good, and so, 



56 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

in whatever mode he acted, his influence must 
be greatly good. He did not believe, that one 
can be a good man, and yet his life and words 
do harm : oh, no ! he knew that He, on whom 
the spirit remained, must baptise others with 
the spirit. His own soul told him this. Had 
he not forsaken the haunts of common toil, 
abjured the effeminate pleasures of youth, 
worn camel's hair and a leather girdle, and 
fed on locusts and wild honey, so as to give time 
and strength, heart and life, to the calling men 
to repentance ? — and now, there comes one, be- 
fore whom he instinctively feels his star must 
wane; so quiet, yet so majestic, — so loving, yet 
so uncompromising ! I never knew thee till 
now, exclaims the generous hearted young re- 
former ; but since I have learned what it is to 
love and toil for men, I bare record, that this 
lamb of God shall perfect the work which I 
have but begun. What a charm does the* 
baptiser's rough energy borrow from this 
sweet simplicity. No jealousy of being sup- 
planted or outshone. Oh, no ! it belongs to that 
pure enthusiasm of youth, which we all, more 
or less, share, ere the world has degraded us ; 
^^ the unselfish homage to excellence ; the aban- 

^ donment to the bliss, of admiring and loving a 



\ 

INSIGHT. 57 

genius, that rules our own. John knew Jesus' 
love and power, and the work it would do on 
the world, because he knew his own : spirit 
testifies to spirit ; it is the only authoritative 
testimony, the only witness that can be fully 
trusted. Did a dove descend on the head of 
Jesus of Nazareth, at his baptism ? I doubt 
it not : Matthew, and Mark, and Luke, would 
scarcely have dreamed of so sweet an em- 
bellishmeut, and even the vision-seeing John 
cannot be allowed to claim it ; it seems so re- 
dolent of truth and nature. We will believe 
it, for we feel the cool fanning of its wings upon 
our heart. Little wist that winged one, as it 
issued from the neighboring woods, and touched 
the bowed head of him, who was coming up 
out of the river, that it, alone of its race, be- 
came from that moment immortal ; that play- 
ful alighting two thousand years ago, enshrin- 
ing it, in the heart and imagination of the 
christianized world, a type of the descending 
and alighting in time of the infinite spirit per- 
vading eternity. 

Farther on in the history is a glimpse into 

Jesus' discernment of character ; it is said, 

'•He knew what was in man." Some fancy, 

that it is only men and women of the w^orld, 

5 



58 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

SO called, who know human nature ; but it is 
not so • people of the greatest inward experi- 
ence know men best. The young poet, or 
novelist, with very limited intercourse with so- 
ciety, will draw out of the store-houses of his 
consciousness every description of character ; 
here is a friend, there an acquaiiltance, and 
again, springs out from some dark corner of 
his canvass, a likeness or caricature of our- 
self. Surely, this man has seen everybody ; 
by no means — his is the spontaneous knowledge 
that comes from an intense consciousness of 
his own spirit, which is genius. 

We come into the presence of some persons^ 
and feel as if they knew our whole heart and 
mind ; their thought seems to surround us ; 
we are almost indignant at having the sanc- 
tuary of our inner self thus taken possession 
of; they are universally people of great in- 
ward life, who in some or another mode have 
thought deeply or felt earnestly ; and we 
know, that the more we study our own nature, 
in consciousness, the more profoundly we 
think and feel, the better do we understand the 
whole brotherhood of humanity. Our own 
consciousness is the door that opens into that 
of others. Jesus, reared in obscure Nazareth, 



INSIGHT. 59 

by "the side of his mother, at the trade of his 
father, knew better than he who wore the pur- 
ple of the world's sovereignty, what was in 
man. This is a fact, that hints much. 

Character is the result of a person's habits 
of feeling, thinking, and acting : the total im- 
pression produced by these — it must necessa- 
rily have infinite shades. If it were possible 
to make only one of the two great classes of 
impressions, a totally good or bad, it would re- 
quire no great discernment to judge of char- 
acter ; every body would be either good or bad, 
and this is an arrangement some observers 
seem to fall into ; but it has no reality — it is 
not after the taste of nature. Nature rarely 
delights in contrast — colors sink one into the 
other — black overlaps the blue, and pink slides 
into the white. Nature's extremes are a 
shading-ofF from each other. So of character, 
total black or white is rare, almost impossible ; 
the gradations of mind and heart predominate 
as do the intermediate rays; some characters 
indeed, approach so near white light, that they 
look celestial ; others, again, seem to lie in 
dark masses. Character, being thus delicately 
varied, requires discernment in the observer — 
not only to see, but to separate in seeing. 



60 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

What is all this putting forth so diversely 
of thought and feeling, but the making visible 
of spirit ? So, whoever studies character with- 
out reference to its source, sees but the out- 
side. Spirit can only be studied in conscious- 
ness. Where learn we the fact, that there is 
somewhat else than the visible, the passing ? 
Is it told us ? Conscience, moving behind the 
action, aspiration, tending to the unseen, are 
they hearsay ? As spiritual attainment is only 
the realization of the supremacy of the inner 
presence over the outward, — the feeling, that 
one's own soul is the great reality, and all out- 
ward activity are shadows, that would not be 
but for this central sun,-— so to one, living in 
spirit, its manifestations in character must be 
transparent, just so far in the centre of things, 
as he stands ; he is behind the curtain, and 
sees the secret machinery — the common ob- 
server looks from the outside, as far in as he 
can — -his penetration may be deeper or shal- 
lower, as the case is. 

The spiritualist knows character, by know- 
ing that of which character is the more or 
less broken outline ; he knows truth, where he 
sees it, — ^falsity, where he sees it; he knows the 
footsteps of spirit. As the highest knowledge 



INSIGHT. 61 

of music, supposes keenest sensibility to dis- 
cord, and as the possession of poetic power is 
the safeguard against puerile rhyme, so does 
perception of error come from knowledge of 
right ; by knowing what a straight line is, we 
know what crooked ones are, and the clearer 
our notion of the straight, the quicker our de- 
tection of the reverse. The spiritualist, from 
his knowledge of spirit in consciousness, its 
sovereignty, its direction, its law, has the clear- 
est eye to all moral estrangement ; a bad man 
appears to a good man worse than to any 
other, because none knows so well as the latter, 
how far his brother has transgressed the line 
of truth and justice. Jesus associated with 
publicans and sinners. Was it from ignorance 
of them ? 

Spiritual attainment sharpens the eye of ob- 
servation ; it looks from a great depth, and is 
not easily deceived. Could Judas impose on 
Jesus? Jesus knew loJiat was in Judas. 

A man of intellect is the keenest detector of 
pretension ; he knows intellect when he meets 
it; knows its absence by the same law. The 
genius has lived years, door by door, with his 
neighbors, crossed them at bridal and burying, 
but they knew him not ; presently a kindred 
5* 



62 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

mind comes by chance to his lonely hut, and 
recognises him as soon as he meets him, hails 
him as his peer ; the comrades of the other's 
youth stand by, and astounded, ask, Is not 
this he, whose father and mother we know ? 

Discernment of character is continually made 
a trait of genius, under all its myriad forms. 
It is remarked of our own Washington, that 
he had an apparently instinctive knowledge of 
men ; he was a man of decision, energy, 
weight ; try to impose the opposite upon him, 
a vacillating, milk-water character, and he 
knew him at once ; no fop or pretender could 
know fop or pretender so well as he who was 
neither, but a true, strong, man-of-war's man. 
It is said, he was not deceived wholly in Ar- 
nold ; he knew him base and unprincipled, but 
valued him as a brave soldier and skilful gene- 
ral ; he would not have trusted him with the 
honor of a friend, but deemed his pride, as a 
soldier, would save him from dishonoring his 
country ; he knew thus much, because he was 
high ; had he stood higher, he would have 
known the traitor better, and anticipated his 
crime. Jesus, highest of men, could not be 
deceived ; he knew Judas would betray him, 



INSIGHT. 63 

even him, his Lord, for thirty pieces of silver, 
— and when did Jesus prophecy falsely ? 

Knowledge of character may be found to 
flow primarily from spiritual attainment, or 
spirit consciousness^ given outright in genius 
and virtue, and perfected by cultivation ; that 
in you and I are the germs of this power, so 
manifest in poet and prophet, and by study- 
ing the law of right within, we come to recog- 
nise its fulfilment or transgression in our own 
and others' life. 

The saint knows the sinner best ; he also 
knows best his power of recovery. The good 
always hope most for the bad. The Pharisees 
shunned the poor outcasts of Jerusalem, and 
deemed them lost beyond hope. Jesus saw 
their moral ruin, as no formalist then nor now 
could see ; yet he went to them with tidings 
of redemption. How is this to be accounted 
for, that it is always the best who have the most 
sympathy with the worst ? Must it not come 
from the conscious presence and energy of 
spirit, that it can never be overborne, — that 
in every heart there is an infinite resource, a 
sleeping inspiration of goodness, which needs 
but to be quickened, to renovate the whole life, 



64 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

that despair of oneself or others is disbelief in 
God, — a turning away from that infinite hope 
which he has put in man, and which testifies to 
an undying power of recovery ? 

Spiritual discernment breaks down spiritual 
pride. The superficial observer only is pufied 
up by his apparent advantages. The spirit- 
ualist feels, in an especial manner, the kindred 
of all immortal natures. He knows this na- 
ture is divine, though degraded : 

" The sunshine from the rill, 

Tho' turned aside, is sunshine still." 

He knows the nearness of God, and that all, 
in reality, do lie in his bosom, though some 
drink continually of his spirit, and grow strong 
thereby ; and others refuse it, and are poor 
and w^eak. Will the vigorous and beautiful 
son, Jesus, scorn his starved and ailing brother ? 
Ah, no ; for this saddest one he cares the most. 
Severity and self-righteous contempt is surely 
rebuked by the tender consideration of the best 
beloved of the Father. If we could but bear 
in mind, that if there are those more sinful 
than ourselves, it is not that they are not chil- 
dren of the same love, but that their portion of 
the nectar of God's life has been less : it mat- 
ters not how ; perhaps from adverse circum- 



INSIGHT. 65 

Stances or unhappy organization. The fact 
that they are starvelings, is sufficient demand 
on the sympathy of whoever claims to have 
received that life : and how few can show 
aught, comparable to the full and free develope- 
ment of those who had lived and grown by 
that alone ! 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 

The soul seeks truth, reality — nothing else 
— for it is itself reality, and seeks its kind. 
How does it make this search ? In life, in ex- 
perience, in every-day actions, we are doing 
Somewhat to find out somewhat. Life, as we live 
it, is experiencing ; that which we have lived, 
is experiment. We are experimenters, each 
in our way. The soul is constantly searching 
for truth, to attain the real thing for which it 
unwearied yearns. In olden time, men made 
great outlays in time, talent, wealth, in search 
for the art of makin^r crold. The art eluded 



66 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

them ; but out of their experiments was evolved 
a great amount of chemical knowledge. It 
seems as if nature held out this alluring bait 
to lead men through difficult paths of study, 
that they might not else have trodden. Gold 
is not the object of study, but knowledge : and 
though they missed the gold, they found the 
knowledge. Now truth is the object of life ; 
but it, possibly, nay probably, is not our aim. 
We are seeking, perhaps every one is seeking, 
happiness, rest, content, — to bring this or that 
thing to pass — to do this or that for the gratifi- 
cation it, in some way, affords. The gold 
of satisfaction glistens in our eyes all the 
time. The girl says, I will do this to-day, or 
have that to-morrow ; and the woman of the 
world says, I will live after such or such a 
mode : and all, in our individual way, seek for 
this bringing things as we want them. This is 
the precious secret that entices on old and 
young, grave and gay, wise and foolish : this 
bringing out life just as we wish it ; and this 
we never attain. As faithful as are our experi- 
ments, the gold will not come up ; always some 
material or other is left out that frustrates the 
whole. Our work seems in vain ; and yet not 
one of these experiments is lost. These de- 



V 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 67 

tails that seem so very trifling, this coming 
hither to-day, and going thither to-morrow, 
have some meaning, else we should not do 
them. Each and all experiments after some 
particular good, unsuccessful perhaps, but in- 
valuable as an exercise of the soul : we could 
not have done without it. We assume a re- 
sponsibility, or make an undertaking, or com- 
mence a study, and, at the end of a certain 
time, throw all up in disgust; feeling it an ut- 
ter failure, — time, energy, talent, wasted. But, 
is this so ? The special object may have failed : 
it has not produced the spectral gold we sought, 
but all the good of the experiment is ours. 
The acquisition of the particular good might 
have been but a puny triumph, for which the 
soul had no necessity ; but realization of the 
soul's being able to do without it, — that were 
worth all the expenditure to attain. Moses 
toiled with the Israelites, but died within sight 
of the promised land, — the hope of his life. 
Was his life then a failure ? The mere step- 
ping into Palestine would have been a very 
petty thing, scarce worth a life like that of 
Moses : but the endurance and patience that 
hope developed, was his true success. God 
did not disappoint him : he had the promised 



68 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

land in his soul ; it had done its work for him ; 
he needed not to enter therein. Viewed from 
this point, defeat is not possible : the living soul 
gains, from any event, all that it can give. Do 
we rise in the morning, and go through a day, 
and retire at night, with every plan of the day 
frustrated, — every hope with which it began 
disappointed : is the day lost ? There is no 
loss about it : we have gained from it all, it 
could give. Its whole experience is ours ; the 
soul is never defeated ; its name is victor ; it 
goes forth conquering and to conquer : and 
these experiments it failed in, or rather they 
failed to it, because they could not give it 
what it sought ; but all they could give, it 
took. We set our heart on some object, and 
lose it ; just as we are about to raise its cup to 
our lips, an unseen hand dashes it away : it is 
because the soul needs it not ; it has taken all 
from that cup of happiness that the latter can 
yield to it : the soul voluntarily rejects it ; but 
we are not conscious of this, because we are 
not conscious of our spirit nature ; but only a 
sort of half-consciousness. 

The soul gains truth only in experiencing, 
or conscious living. All experience is an in- 
let to some portion of truth ; and the highest 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 69 

truth must be a matter of experience. This 
did Jesus insist upon in his conversation with 
Nicodemus : ^' A man to know a truth, must 
be born into it.'' 

This man came to Jesus with evident rever- 
ence, impressed, as he says, by the greatness 
of Jesus' works : " Rabbi, we know God must be 
with thee, because of the great works thou doest, 
(not because of what thou art, or teachest, but) 
of what thou doest : they are great things ; no 
man could do them alone. God must be with 
you." This was Nicodemus' solving of the 
problem of Jesus' power : " These are great 
things ; no man can do them. God must help 
him." Jesus appears to feel that the other did 
not see very clearly into his secret ; he replies, 
rather indirectly, " A man, to know these 
things, must be born into them." The Jewish 
rulers' acknowledgment of his power, and its 
source, did not satisfy the Jewish peasant ; yet 
he certainly said, truly, '' No man can do such 
things unless God be with him." Just so ; but 
how, Nicodemus, have you learned this ? 
Have you heard that divine deeds coma from 
divine power ; or, knowing yourself unable to 
do the like, do you make your own conscious- 
ness the standard of man? However he 
6 



70 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

gained the truth he uttered, its expression did 
not meet Jesus' approbation, for his answer 
may be paraphrased, " Attempt not to solve 
the problem of divine power in man ; for a 
man, to understand this, must be possessor 
of it." 

Nicodemus did not state the secret of spirit- 
ual power falsely, but superficially : what he 
said was true, but not the expression of a truth 
wrought from his own experience : his words 
were cant. He was, without doubt, perfectly 
sincere : cant is not necessarily insincere ; it 
is the expression of a truth, which is one of au- 
thority or tradition, and not evolved from the 
individual consciousness : it is the language of 
a party, passively accepted. So is cant taught 
to children, before they dream of religious pre- 
tension. They are trained to express truths 
that are not nor never could have been truths 
of their experience. 

I was once in a stranger sunday school, and 
took the care of an unsupplied class. In its 
number was one fine, bright-looking little girl. 
As she appeared singularly open, confiding and 
conversible, I sought to learn from her her no- 
tion of God, and his relation to herself. She 
immediately began to tell me, very rapidly, tha 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 71 

God was good, and loved good children ; and 
if we were not good, we could not be happy ; 
and it was the happiest thing in the world to 
obey him, &;c. I stopped in utmost consterna- 
tion ; for I saw that this child, in repeating the 
good lessons that had been taught her, was ut- 
tering a string of cant, — expressing truths that 
had no part nor parcel in her inner life, — and 
so had no religious worth in them. Probably, 
if any one had helped her to read her consci- 
ousness aright, the record might have run 
something thus : God is good, when he lets me 
have plenty of amusement, and every thing I 
want. I sometimes like to think of him ; but 
I prefer, at any time, a race in the fresh air, 
or a laughing chat with my playmates. There 
would have been no cant in these words, and 
therefore delightful to hear — the frank expres- 
sion of uncultured childhood. The speaker 
would have been true, and so the very subject 
for wise spiritual culture ; for we must, first 
of all, be simple. It is not enough to be sin- 
cere, — that is, not intend to deceive ; but we 
must be simple, — say and do what we genu- 
inely are and know, be it little or much. 

Nicodemus was sincere, but not simple : he 
had not separated what he really believed and 



72 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

felt from what he considered it duty to believe 
and feel : he was not simply true. It seems 
to me, that the first step of all is, to be trae to 
our convictions, whatever they are. In edu- 
cation, we receive so continually the doctrines, 
maxims and notions of others, that it is difficult 
to lay them off from us, and find out what we 
do really understand and know, — what wo 
have proved ourselves. Idle scholars, who 
may have a question in arithmetic, are very 
willing others should work out the sum, while 
they note down the answer : they have perfect 
faith that the answer is correct ; but it is not 
their own solution, and, with respect to their 
exercise in numbers, a false solution, so it were 
their own, were far better than a borrowed 
correct one. So is it in regard to the great 
questions of duty, immortality, the meaning of 
life : what have we proved, experienced about 
them ? Not what we have been taught or told, 
but what we have ourselves worked out. What 
though our statement of these things be not 
the correct one ; what though it differ a frac- 
tion here and there, or even a whole unit, 
from those wiser and older ; what matter ? if 
it be our own sum, it is better than if we copied 
it from some one's else slate ; and, besides this? 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 73 

every faithful trial is increasing our know- 
ledge, and bringing us nearer to the truth : 
every genuine experience is preparing us for 
a deeper and wider, until we learn all the se- 
crets of the spirit through experience or life of 
the spirit, and know its power, just so far as 
we possess it within us. 

Nicodemus received the truth Jesus ex- 
pressed as a truth to the senses, " How can a 
man be born again ?" as if there were no birth 
but that into the outward world : as if this 
were not the sign of what goes on in the inner 
life : that the soul is constantly passing into 
successive states of existence, continually com- 
ing into new truth. There seems to be no 
outward fact, that has not its parallel in a 
spiritual fact. Birth, childhood, age, death, 
are phenomena visible to the senses ; and they 
seem to be an expression or representation of 
certahi invisible phenomena, — a picturing of 
unseen realities ; and this must necessarily 
be so, for what is this outward? A certain 
mode in which spirit manifests itself. So there 
can be nothing in the outward which is not in 
the spirit ; nothing in the world of the senses 
which has not an answerino; fact in the world 
of thought and feeling. Once acknowledge 
6* 



74 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

that spirit is reality ; that underneath the ap- 
pearances that impress our senses, there is a 
reality which is not an appearance, — then it is 
the action of this invisible power that produces 
what we call outward facts. These strike our 
senses. Youth, infancy, age, death, our meet- 
ings and partings ; they seem to subsist for 
themselves alone. We forget they are but ex- 
pressions of somewhat interior to them : we 
regard only the outward ; we do not see the 
inner in the outward, — the ideal in the actual ; 
and yet this is the only way we encounter 
spirit at all. Spirit, invisible force, that which 
we are, and that which is, and acts around us, 
is recognised by us, only in what it does, in 
what it puts forth in the outward. I am a 
spirit, a thinking, feeling, acting being ; but, 
take from me all outward manifestation, speech, 
look, act ; deprive me of the body, of any 
form or mode of existence, and I should be to 
you as though I were not ; but let me show 
myself in some way, and you recognise me, 
and just so great as is my manifestation, just 
so much power as I put forth, to just such a 
degree shall I be to you a living being. Spirits 
must appear, in order to be recognised. We 
know God by what he does within and without 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 75 

US. Did he put himself forth in no way, he 
would be to us as though he were not. A re- 
vealed God is alone a living God. 

As we perceive spirit only in its manifesta- 
tions, and all the outward is its action, then 
every material fact must express some spirit- 
ual fact. Our mental vision is dim, and we 
see but the outward. Youth, age, position:, 
wealth, fame ; these things seem to us to stand 
for themselves. We do not see that which 
underlies and gives to them worth and signifi- 
cance. It is here that genius and piety have 
their advantages over us. Genius, by the force 
of intellect, sees through the outward, sees that 
it is but the dim shadowing of a deep reality. 
Wordsworth says, '^ Our life is but a sleep and 
a forgetting." Sleep is the outward fact to the 
poet ; it does not stand for itself; it represents 
somewhat hidden, as it were behind or within 
it:— 

" Gorgeous flowerets, in the sun-light shining, 
Blossoms flaunting in the eye of day." 

" Brilliant hopes, all woven in gorgeous tissues, 
Large desires with most uncertain issues." 

Here is merely the mention of certain forms, 
attractive to the eye, followed by the sentiments 



76 STUDIES 11^ RELIGION. 

they suggested to the observer. " The poet," 
says one, who is himself a poet, ^' is one who sees 
what is," sees the real fact under the surface of 
the outward. Now the genuine religionist 
does this same thing : his mental eye is clari- 
fied by the purity of his heart, and to these is a 
most intimate connection between piety and 
genius. The pure expression of religious sen- 
timent is alvrays poetic : the Bible is the most 
poetical of books : it abounds in emblems and 
pictures : its chambers are filled with imagery, 
piety and genius feel spontaneously that every 
outward fact is the natural representation of 
some spirit-truth : Genius knows that things 
seen are appearances,7--things unseen, realities 
of the mind and heart. The saint says, 
' Things seen are temporal, things unseen eter- 
nal :' the outward sign vanisheth, but God's 
thought remaineth. 

This trait of the human mind, in its highest 
developement, explains the frequent use Jesus 
made of the events and circumstances of life 
as a medium of moral instruction : it is the 
mode God himself uses, and the secret he 
whispers to his favored ones in intellect, and 
virtue. There is a birth to the soul, a coming 
into a nev/ state of existence, a being-acted- 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 77 

upon by new influences, nourished by new 
food ; and this takes place whenever we pass 
from one truth or from one spiritual experience 
into another. The spirit's life is wonderfully 
analogous, nay, seems to answer part for part 
to the body's life, as face answers to face in 
the glass : the spirit is born into a truth, assi- 
milates it to itself as food, becomes strong upon 
it, and grows up to comely stature : by-and- 
by, that which has been to it the source of 
life and health, ceases longer to yield to it ap- 
propriate nourishment : the hungry soul looks 
round for new supply : this failing, it sinks, it 
faints, it dies. To avoid such disastrous fate 
it must be born again, must put off its old life, 
and become a fresh infant in a higher region 
of Truth. Strange that anyone can reluct at 
this, can overlook the exceeding joyfulness of 
this recreated life. How enchanting is infancy, 
so fresh, so novel : how does its presence make 
the grown world look '^ stale, flat, and unprofit- 
able :" how were its magic enhanced, did we 
always see into its significance : that we too 
can pass into a new existence of higher truth : 
that we can revel there, as infants, fair, un- 
soiled, unharmed and unharming, with no past 
behind, and an interminable future before. 



78 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

What an infinite hope is there in this ! Men 
say of themselves, Infancy is gone, childhood 
is gone, youth is gone : and the old add to the 
melancholy wail, Life is clean gone forever. 
But it is not so : it is all an illusion of the 
senses : it is the sly and malicious pretence of 
Time : the soul has the gift of perpetual reno- 
vation. Do forms become an irksomeness and 
restriction ? Do opinions grow dry and hard ? 
Do views of God and duty seem harsh and 
partial and oppressive ? Then does the true soul 
pass out from these houses of clay, and become 
a young, wondering, gleeful child again, in the 
palace-home of new revelation. 

Old Isaiah, with the insight of a true poet, 
makes God to say, *^ When Israel was a child, 
then I loved him." ^' Except ye become little 
children,'' says Jesus. God loves the child- 
soul, that is, the mind and heart, that is plastic, 
growing, looking always upward and ever on- 
ward. How Jesus insists on this perpetual re- 
newal : "Ye must become a child;" nay, 
more, he says to Nicodemus, " Ye must be 
horn again." 

We all remember the beautiful fable, of the 
existence somewhere of a miraculous fount, 
which, if any one found and dipped therein. 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 79 

his youth would return unto him. Myriads 
have believed this tale, and many a traveller's 
heart has doubtless beat quick, with the hope 
of discovering the magic waters. And is there 
no truth in such tales ? Is it not the very 
cause why they are so eagerly taken to the 
human heart, that there is a truth in them, 
that they are enigmas, in which a spiritual fact 
is read ? Think you that the wildest longing 
of the human heart has not its basis in a hope 
which tends continually to fruition ? Man saw 
the glory of youth pass from him, the step grow 
heavy, the cheek pale, the eye dim : he looked 
on the bloom of the child, the vigor of the strip- 
ling, and said in almost despairing earnestness, 
*' Give, oh give to me back my youth :" and the 
poet stepped forth, and lulled and sustained 
him, by fables beautiful as this of the Indian 
fount, and the simple heart believed, because 
the recital answered to an undying instinct of 
the soul : nor did it believe a lie. Every gen- 
uine instinct finds realization. God mocks not 
man : the instinctive prayer is met by the bold 
assertion of the spiritualist. Youth not only 
can, but must return : ye must be born again : 
infinite truth is a fountain of perpetual youth : 
h e who dips therein comes forth a new crea- 



60 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ture. Again, he hears the low, sweet laughter 
of hope ; again fantasies, imaginings, aspira- 
tions, gather around him like the rustling of 
innumerable wings : his glance, keen as an 
eagle's, darts anew into an all-possible future : 
again from the height, above and beyond him, 
a divine voice calls. Come up hither. 

The imagination is true to this instinct for 
renewal : it represents the pure soul, as an 
angel, almost always a winged child. 

The instant we feel that we no longer need 
to be children in knowledge, that we are ma- 
ture, and may cease to be learners, then do we 
begin to droop intellectually and morally : then 
comes on age apace. This feeling of self- 
satisfaction, that we know quite enough, is that 
wand of the malicious fairy whose touch trans- 
forms the fairest and youngest into wrinkles 
and decrepitude. One would think that this 
assertion of one who spoke as Jesus did, from 
deepest experience, were enough to transport 
us with joy. What then ! the true life is not 
run out : there is no age, no death, but only 
re-birth, re-youth, a dipping forever in the 
waters of immortality ! And such renewal is 
necessary : there is no other passport in the 
spirit-realm. On all alike is laid this condi- 



KNOWLEDGE THROUGH EXPERIENCE. 81 

tion. To see truth higher than that which we 
now see, to understand a spiritual power great- 
er than that we now possess, we must be bom 
into it : and with such entrance comes there a 
" new heaven and new earth," for He who 
rules the realm of inward and outward life is 
the source of unceasing renovation. ^' Behold,*' 
he says, ^ I make all things new.'' 



NEW-YEAR. 

What wouldst thou, Ella, from me hear ; 
Wouldst tidings of the opening year 1 
I felt its wind upon my cheek. 
Like vigor's touch unto the weak ; 
And heart and pulse leaped up anew, 
In its brave sun and heaven blue : 
And brow, and brain, and ear, and eye, 
Lived in its pure transparency. 

The thoughts it gave, were thoughts of cheer, 
A pasan for the opening year ! 
For life was flowing swift and strong, 
It bore earth, sea, and sky along, — 
A life, whose other name is love, 
7 



B2 STUDIES IN RELIGION* 

Heaved from below, and beamed above : 

On its entrancing tide upborne, 

I hailed and blest the New- Year's moFn I 

Come, look on yonder arch divine, 
And thou shalt read the glory- sign : 
Come, listen to the wind that blows. 
And thou shalt hear it as it flows. 
A song of cheer for me and thee, 
Freedom and strength, that speedily j 
A ransoming from care and strife, 
A life in heaven, and heaven in life. 

For, as this wintry wind hath tones, 
So soft they seem to speak of Spring, 
So every common day that comes, 
Hath hidden beauty on its wings : 
And as the pleasant sun to-day 
Is brighter than the day before, 
So on the spirit's untried way 
Is radiance never known of yore r 
For close within God's breast we lie, 
Circled, as by these breezes bland. 
And though a shadow dim the eye, ^ 
Transparent clearness is at hand : 
As, leaving with ttie past, the wild. 
The ceaseless strife of human care, 
We, like a glad, recovered child, 
Respond unto the voice of cheer, 
The unrepressed from Nature's heart, 
And learn the mystery in part, 
The meaning of the new-born year! 



WATER. 83 



WATER. 

Jesus, while sitting by a well-side, in his 
journey through Palestine, made a remark to 
a woman, who had come to the same spot to 
draw water, which betrays his deep insight 
into life. " If thou knowest,^' he said, " the gift 
of God, thou wouldst ask and receive living 
water.'' 

Opportunities, our opportunities of receiving 
or giving somewhat ! if we only knew them, 
when they were present, and did not so often 
have to say, Alas, I knew not that that hour, 
that occasion, that meeting with or missing of a 
friend, was a gift of God, and so I let it pass, 
and lost the living water it offered. 

The circumstances in which w^e, at any 
given time, are placed, constitute our opportu- 
nities of improvement and happiness. Oppor- 
tunity means somewhat that is offered, or put 
before one. Life is the opportunity of the soul ; 
it is placed before the soul, to see what the 
soul will do with it. An angel might w^hisper, 
** If you but knew this gift of God, you would 



84 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ask and receive of it living water;" and if this 
be true of life, as a whole, it is as true of its 
every part ; every circumstance about us, every 
relation we sustain, every communion into 
which we are brought with nature or persons, 
is a gift of God, replete with spirit, could we 
but know and ask of it. 

We are very liable to consider much, per- 
haps most of our life, common-place ; daily 
employments, intercourse with one's family, 
risings and retirings, walks and talks, meetings 
and partings ; we consider these quite ordi- 
nary things, and look out for remarkable 
events, uncommon circumstances, wonderful 
opportunities, that shall awaken in us, or be- 
stow upon us, vast and unimagined good. Daily 
life, we call common life, and use such phrases 
as romantic events, singular occasions, as hap- 
pening here and there to an isolated individual, 
and investing that individual's experience with 
an ideal coloring either of bliss or wo. 

Now it seems to me, that it is worth realizing 
that there is no such thing as common-place 
life, or uninteresting circumstance ; they are 
so, only, because we do not see into them, do 
not know them, as Jesus said : if we did, we 
should find they were full of the water of 



WATER. 85 

truth and beauty. The Samaritan woman, 
went out that day, as she had, in all proba- 
bility, myriad times before, to draw water : an 
unexciting, unastonishing event, that drawing 
of water; she finds (no unusual thing) a 
wearied traveller resting beside the well ; when 
this person, being a Jew, accosts her, asking a 
favor, she is rather surprised, indeed, but had 
the conversation ended with her somewhat un- 
gracious reply, she might soon have forgotten 
it, and returned home, and gone to her nigl^ 
ly sleep, thinking that day but one of the man^ 
ordinary ones of her life ; yet had she been 
face to face, with the highest born of God's 
sons ! Well for her, Jesus arrests her atten- 
tion, " If thou but knewest what this moment 
is, this gift of God." 

Our life of every day, working and study- 
ing and visiting, meeting with others, and be- 
ing met by them, we call ordinary, because we 
look only upon its surface ; truly seen, it is 
very wonderful, full of living water. What 
we call remarkable events, are not so in the 
passing ; afterwards, when their fruition and 
result is seen, do they appear so great ; people 
talk of golden opportunities, but the opportu- 
7* 



80 STUDIES m RELIGION. 

nity when before us, does not look golden ; as 
the light of memory falls upon it, does it shine 
so bright ; in a boat, at sea, the streak of light 
is on the water just passed over, and yet that 
water, before passing, was as dark as that which 
lies before. It is difficult to believe this ; op- 
portunities are thrown away in a vain wish- 
ing for their presence, circumstances are ne- 
glected in waiting for circumstances, forgetting 
that when a God assumes mortal form, he only 
discovers himself, at the moment of departure, 
tnat the most e very-day occurrence, the most 
apparently trivial, is divine, the gift of God. 

It is something to learn to live in the present^ 
to feel that the present duty, pleasure, circum- 
stance, is alone good and wonderful ; we say, 
if we were only differently placed, life would 
be so interesting ; if we were in such or such 
a position, then should we be intellectual, or 
amiable, or useful, or if this or that event should 
happen to us, then should we be elated and 
happy. It is all a mistake. That very event 
or position, if possessed by us, would look just 
as little extraordinary as that we are now in ;. 
situations, not our own, lie before us, like a 
landscape view ; every part, however mean 
in detail, goes to contribute to the effect of the 



WATER. 87 

whole, and shares in its ideal character ; but 
we cannot see the picture, of which we our- 
selves form a part. We do not know, that the 
day, the hour, the employment, the incident, 
before which we in our own persons stand, and 
that looks perhaps so worn and dusty, is in re- 
ality divine, an inexhaustible well of truth, 
could we but wipe from our eyes the blinding 
dust of familiarity. For life to cease to be 
poor and common-place, and become intrinsi- 
cally rich and wonderful, we must realize 
that if it is, as a whole, a gift of God, then all 
its parts must so be ; if relation to parents, 
friends, society, are of divine appointment, then 
every thing flowing out of this relation, inter- 
course -and influence, meetings in the house^ 
in the neighborhood, in the street, the private 
room and social gathering, our book and work- 
basket, are of divine appointment. How grand 
and mystic, then, is this every-day life ; it is 
inlaid with divinity, as black oak inlaid with 
gold ; and David utters a literal fact, when he 
speaks of his down-setting and up-rising as 
encompassed by God. 

The happening and doing of every day, has 
somewhat to give us, if we will only recog- 
nize its divinity, and ask its gift; and this 



88 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

gift is spirit-life, — what Jesus calls, " living 
water." 

Every circumstance, position, or occurrence, 
if rightly recognized, awaken vv^ithin us, 
thought and emotion ; and thinking and feel- 
ing is life ; highest thinking and feeling is 
spiritual life. The highest good any event or 
person can do for us, is to inspire a thought, or 
quicken an emotion. Do we not recollect, tj^at 
cool transparency, that environed our wliole 
being, with the dawn of a thought ? We 
seemed to have bathed ocean-deep in liquid 
light — and an emotion of joy or aw^e, or admi- 
ration or tenderness — how is its presence like 
a summer's rain : how moist and still grows 
the heart: how soft it beats: we draw a long 
breath as it passes, like some fainting one, that 
has been revived by a grateful draught. Liv- 
ing water, indeed ! Is not an hour of earnest 
emotion, even though the emotion be painful, 
called an interesting hour ? Is not a moment 
of thought, marked in the memory ? If this be 
so, then just so much thought and emotion as we 
have, just so much true life we have ; but we 
are afraid of thinking and feeling, and so in 
their stead, come monotony and tedium. The 
most apparently dead-level life, is various to 



WATER. 89 

the animated thought, the most trivial event is 
engaging to the active v^it and stirring affec- 
tion. We must cultivate thought ; it is the 
incoming of divinity ; we must give our affec- 
tions and emotions free play, the gay, the ten- 
der, the fanciful, the profound, the merry and 
sad, even the awful and melancholy, for these 
are elements of the grand, and the nearer our 
nature approaches the presence of Infinity, 
does the grand and sublime absorb it. As it 
is, we too often mock at sentiment, scorn fancy^ 
and so life comes to be prosaic and dull ; we 
wait for a circumstance, that shall stir up the 
depths of our emotion, melt, kindle, inspire, and 
this comes not, can never come to the dull 
head and duller heart ; but the meetings of 
the mornings, and partings of the evenings, 
the hand- work and head-work of each day, 
petty weaknesses and businesses, these make 
up the life of the many ; and this, to a being 
of various capacities, soon seems common and 
mean ; the young heart seeks redemption from 
this flatness of reality, in imaginary scenes, 
dreams of duties, that have the piquancy of 
excited feeling, of meetings and partings, that 
are worth the cost of smiles and tears ; and 
this habit only serves to make actual life more 



90 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

wearisome ; it can be remedied only by a re- 
alization of the truth, that life, just as it is, is 
not and cannot be common ; that its every de- 
tail is divine — a gift of God ; that these may 
be quiet, unobtrusive, meek ; but quietness is 
the sign of depth, and meekness is the child of 
power ; they may have no misty shade wings, 
may seem to lie in the simple sun-light, but 
this sun-light itself invests them from a far 
immensity. See, what genius does with these 
commonalities of ours : how do our meagre 
sayings and doings become tinged under his 
touch, with the colors of romance ! He does 
but fill these worn channels, with fresh waters 
from the fountain of being ; this rising from 
sleep, this return from the realm of insensi- 
bility or dreams, these greetings of renewed 
life, this working, and walking, and talking ; he 
but steals from these a thought, draws from 
out of them a sentiment — and lo, they are trans- 
figured before us, and become things for the 
imagination to love and linger upon. 

Let us, then, meet the events and duties of 
every day, not in a spirit of opposition, with. 
What wouldst thou of me ? but recognising its 
divinity, receive the living water it offers. To 
many, perhaps to all of us, life looks back, 



WATER. 91 

with such a reproach ; the days and hours 
that are gone, sit like doves, and moan to us. 
Oh, if thou hadst but known me ! We will, 
henceforth, open our eyes to the divine signifi- 
cance of what lies constantly about us ; if 
God appoints all, all have divine meaning. 
To genius and to piety, life is always great. 
To genius, no circumstance, no position, is 
common-place, but each is picturesque and 
peculiar; to the purest devotion, no action, 
that is right to be done, is low or mean, but all 
are divine and of heaven ; here again is the 
ground where genius and piety meet ; so that 
the highest burst of genius is always devout, 
and the truest expression of devotion is ever 
full of the fire of genius ; and as we increase 
in profoundness of thought and feeling, do we 
approach both, for so far as life becomes holy, 
does it grow rich and poetic, and the saint is 
the peer and brother of genius. 



92 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 



SNOW. 

Oh, wandering man, uncomely, bent and torn, 
With meagre brow, low lip and heavy eye, 
How canst thou bear the snowy flakes that lie, 
(Lightest, aerial things of nature born,) 
In their soft, magic touch, upon thy forml 
Dost thou not shiver, as at angel-fingers 1 
Art thou not scared, at the exceeding white 
Dream of impassive purity, that lingers. 
As every crystal atom melts to sight'? 
Alas ! that look unmeaning, answers no; — 
And I, too, through God's mystic spirits go, 
In careless heart and haste : not reverent and slow. 



WORSHIP. 

Worship is reverence paid to that which is 
of worth : that which is highest must be wor- 
thiest of homage. A false object of worship is 
one less than the highest, the paying allegiance 
to that which is not the widest, nor fairest, nor 



WORSHIP. 93 

loftiest, of which the mind has knowledge. 
When the object is the highest to which the 
mind has arrived, and the homage paid to it is 
that of free love and active obedience, then is 
the object and the worship alike genuine. 

What do we worship ? What idea or feel- 
ing, or combination of ideas and feelings, do we 
consider most worthy of reveren<^e and love ? 
God is the name we give to a being, of whom 
we conceive as containing within himself all 
excellence. Our conception of God must con- 
tain our highest ideas of wisdom and goodness, 
for if it do not, it is a false object of worship, 
because the highest must always be the wor- 
thiest. It is impossible that any true concep- 
tion of Him can be less than our ultimate of 
excellence, because this would make us capa- 
ble of conceiving of a greater than the infinite. 
It must always be less than him, but it is the 
material of which the notion of him is formed : 
so that a true object of worship can only be 
that which contains the highest in our ideas, 
the widest and deepest in our emotions, and to 
this conception we give the name of God. Now 
we may receive an outside, arbitrary notion 
of God, which may be greater or less than our 
8 



94 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

own ideal of excellence ; if greater, it is to us 
as if it were not ; if less, it is a false object of 
worship — making a God of a less than the 
highest. We only abjure idols, and turn to 
the true God, when we attribute to the being 
we adore, the loftiest, widest and fairest in our 
thoughts ; that is, when we make our own na- 
ture, in its breadth and depth, the revelation to 
us of him — not that the soul exhausts God — it 
must always be less than him, as the finite is 
less than the infinite ; but as there can be 
nothing in the finite, which is not in the infinite, 
the soul must always be the disclosure of God 
to man. If neglecting the revelation close at 
hand, we go abroad to learn about God, we 
are assailed with vastly contradictory reports. 
One represents him as a being of sternest jus- 
tice, '' visiting the sins of the fathers upon the 
children," and never remitting the full penalty. 
Another pictures him as of unbounded indul- 
gence, calling not even the sinner into account. 
What ultimate appeal is there but one's own 
nature, which is the open volume of God ? 
Here we find that men's views are not so far 
wrong, only as they are partial. People do 
not contend earnestly for shadows ; it is always 
truth that the defender of a point sees, though 



WOE SHIP. 95 

his statement of it may be falsehood. What 
means this fearful uprise of our conscience ? 
It will not let us off when we do wrong ; it re- 
lents not at tears ; it has no pity for petition ; 
it stands beside till the whole debt is paid, 
measure for measure. Surely God dwelleth 
in darkness : the terrible pictures of the wrath 
of the infinite upon the finite, of destruction 
without remedy, are but the lighter or coarser 
sketchings of the soul's realities, of the re- 
venge it takes for wrong, in ruin and remorse. 
But again, our nature moves in its affections ; 
we feel the unfathomable swayings of love ; 
the mother will die to save her child, the child 
the parent : we watch hours by the bed of our 
sick beloved ; we yearn for the absent ; we 
mourn for the lost. Human love ! it is as 
mighty, if not mightier than human con- 
science : all nature has been ransacked to find 
meet expressions for it. And what a revela- 
tion is this, of a tide setting into the human 
heart, from the boundless ocean of God's affec- 
tion ! I confess, that for myself, it is very use- 
less and insufficient to call me outwards to 
proofs of God's love, to the beauty and bliss 
everywhere discoverable in nature, to lustrous 
plumage and ravishing bird-song, to the ever- 



96 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

new drapery of the flowers, and the untiring 
sport of the insect. Alas, between their bright- 
ness and my vision presses a crowd of miser- 
able human faces ; the cheek of childhood is 
old with the ravages of woe, and though birds 
chirp and carol, the voices of men and women 
are dumb in anguish or broken in the mutter- 
ings of despair. Does one see joy and love in 
the universe ? so sees another pain and hate, 
and hard insensibility ; but ask the individual 
heart. What know you, or what dream you of 
the capabilities of human affection ? What 
has love not dared and done ? how has 
it arrayed itself against scorn and con- 
tumely in its proud omnipotence, like a 
lion at bay : every legend of dim antiquity, 
every song on a nation's lips is a bye- word of 
the presence and power of human aflfection, — 
often acting blindly, always asserting itself vic- 
tor over suffering and death ; and yet its high- 
est tide can be but a ripple on the ocean of the 
infinite heart, but that ripple must be of the 
nature and quality of the whole ocean. Surely 
God is scarcely less fearful in the revelation of 
his love than his justice, and the thought 
shrinks hardly more awe-struck from the one 
than from the other. The representations we 



WORSHIP. 97 

often hear 6f God are narrower than the move* 
ments of our own nature, — less just, less loving, 
and so less grand and inspiring. God is made 
smaller than man, instead of being his infinite 
original. 

So close at hand has God put this primal 
bible, even our own soul, that we cannot de- 
cline to read it : it needs not to be brought to 
us : it is the first and last book of the child- 
man : his ' Alpha and Omega,' and though 
time and thought are indeed requisite to study 
all its mysteries, yet there are larger charac- 
ters which the " runner may read :" the ener- 
gies of love, the impulses of joy, the sentiment 
of beauty, how are they ours, unless they are 
first His ? If we went to a fountain, and dip- 
ped therefrom water in a cup, there could be 
no water in the cup, which had not been in the 
fountain, so there can be nothing in us which 
is not in its element and infinity in God. He 
has made us the pledge of himself : man is to 
man the representative of God ; man in his 
best and truest developement. But as we can 
understand another only through our own con- 
sciousness, we can understand the highest 
only as his image is drawn out within 
us, and our own consciousness is in the 
8* 



9^8 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

last analysis always our revelation of God^ 
Thence the faith in a genuine revela- 
tion. God cannot betray or mock us, for 
in betraying our love, he betrays his own : 
in mocking our hope, he mocks himself: 
and men do repose at last on the teachings 
within, with an abandonment of trust that 
nothing else can inspire. The spontaneous 
protest of our whole nature is our Saviour, 
when we are about to give ourselves up to 
any narrow and partial notions of God, duty, 
and heaven. 

As the soul is the revelation of the worthiest, 
consecration of life to the highest it reveals, is 
true v/orship : the highest thought, the widest 
love is imperative, because it approaches near- 
est the reality of God. As in making up our 
conception of God, we must not leave out any 
part of our nature, whose wholeness is his reve- 
lation ; so in seeking what is right to do, we 
find that the true God is truly worshipped in 
the scope and exercise of that whole nature. 

To worship God is to live naturally : to live 
as a half, not as a whole, is not true, natural 
action ; to obey the impulses of the animal be- 
ing only, is to be half human, a monster like a 
creature without a head ; and again to follow 



WORSHIP, 99 

those th'at lead one into the region of the infin* 
ite, and neglect that which unites him to the 
outward, is not to be a whole man, for man is 
spirit manifest in matter, and the law is, to be 
true to the whole power of manifestation. We 
cannot repress any part of our nature without 
injury to that we wish to develope. If we 
fancy that we shall insure the vigor of thought 
by the stifling of the affections, we shall find 
that thought itself lano^uishes from the -shutting 

DO O 

out of its ally ; or if we devote ourselves to a 
life of the affections merely, and neglect the 
power of thought, the heart feels the blow that 
is aimed at the head, for affection gains greatly 
in refinement and depth from the culture of the 
intellect. Our nature is a garment, woven 
without seam throughout, and cannot be parted 
without sacrilege. To be just to any part, we 
must be true to the whole. Fidelity to con- 
science is worship of God, to say and to do the 
right ; so also is allegiance to reason, nev^r to 
bow down to absurdity or wear the trammels of 
superstition : no less is loyalty to the heart, 
to listen to what that spontaneously suggests. 
Peril always comes from trusting to any part 
of our nature alone ; if we would hear God's 
voice, we must listen to the whole. Well nigh 



100 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

fatal did this halfness prove to the Hebrew 
patriarch. Arise, cried the stern sense of duty, 
thou shalt sacrifice to me thy best beloved ; 
but ere the rite was completed, the angel of the 
affections interposed and said, Touch not the 
youth. In myriad cases, men listening to God 
in the convictions of conscience have acted 
cruelly ; they disobeyed him in the equally 
sovereign voice of the affections, and so wor- 
shipped him falsely. 

Although no conviction, nor impulse, nor in- 
stinct of the soul, is to be made an outcast, but 
brought in and treated as a child of the house, 
yet there is a law pervading these, and it is the 
same that obtains throughout all nature, — that 
the highest governs. Outside of us, every 
thing seeks its level : the heaviest is below : 
stone, earth, water, air, light, — just in propor- 
tion as a substance becomes more aerial, intan- 
gible, nearer our notion of spirit, so does it 
float above the rest. Within, love of pleasure, 
desire of action, persistence of will, are spon- 
taneous movements, natural impulses ; not less 
so is reverence for the good, allegiance to the 
right, perception of the beautiful : we call 
these higher impulses, and in that expression 
acknowledge their sovereignty : if a passion and 



WORSHIP. 101 

a sense of duty coniict, it is the order of na- 
ture that the passion give way, as a sense of 
duty, however narrow, always partakes of the 
infinite, and a mere passion is limited in the 
finite, and th^ infinite is necessarily sovereign 
to the finite. 

We love impulsive, spontaneous character, 
but do not feel quite certain of such. Impulse 
is truly very lovely, wild, dangerous, but 
charming, like a free, heedless, care-for-noth- 
ing child. Principle is a somewhat precise, 
unpleasing dame, but she is sure, very sure ; 
perhaps if we look little closer, we may see 
that these two, like fairy transformations, are 
not diverse, but one ; impulse is daring, but not 
lawless : God has hedged us round, so that we 
can no more evade law than we can evade 
him : the comet, as eccentric as is its orbit, 
the meteor, as capricious as its descent, is 
bound by unerring law : the impulses have 
their law, and it is that of all creation, obedi- 
ence to the highest. The highest impulse 
governs the lower; the loftiest thought, the 
purest sentiment, is the natural principle of ac- 
tion ; so that we gain safety with no sacrifice 
of beauty, and the free movements of the child 
blend with the chastened grace of maturity. 



102 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

Let US attribute unto God our most exacting 
sense of justice : we cannot hold the balance 
as even as he does ; let us equally endow him 
with the mightiest sway of our affection : we 
can never fathom his love. He is the whole : 
let us also lay upon his shrine the highest 
reach of thought, the freest play of fancy, the 
energy of will, the varieties of action : he is 
to be worshipped wholly ; the boldest question 
of the head, and the sweetest yearning of the 
heart is to assert its right, without fear or 
favor. No formal worship, no narrow service 
belongs to Him, the universal ; but the free 
action of an intelligence, that seeks to scan his 
own, — the exertion of a will, that in its turn 
would be creator. God is a father, and wishes 
no child of his to be slave or coward ; surely 
the condescension of the infinite is to be met, 
with some generous confidence. 

'' God is a spirit," said Jesus, — the universal, 
the infinite ; he must be worshipped in spirit, 
in the universal, in the free action of the whole 
nature. She, to whom he said this, did not re- 
ceive it : it is as a blaze of light to one coming 
from a dark room : she turns a little from it, 
as if she would wait awhile. " Some one 
else is coming: a great teacher is expected: 



WORSHIP. 103 

he will tell us all things." Ah ! so do, so 
many of us say, " By-and-by we shall know 
every thing : why seek answers to dark ques- 
tions now ? the great future will tell us." 
Nay, but Jesus reproves the Samaritan woman 
with " I am the teacher : pass not by the pre- 
sent to look for a greater in the future : hear 
me." Is there a truth we ought to know ? 
Let us seek to know it now. Is there one 
who can throw light upon it ? let us listen to 
him : he is the Messiah : the present teacher 
is the great teacher. Whoever awakens us to 
a life of thought and love, unseals a fount of 
inexhaustible joy, for God is revealed in the 
utmost measure of these, and the life which is 
their living expression, is His worship. The 
event or person, that is the medium to us, of 
this revelation of God, is ^' he that was to come," 
and announces himself as such in the possess- 
ing and imparting of highest truth. 



104 STUDIES IN RELIGIONo. 



COMMUNION. 

The dictionary gives the meaning of the word 
commune as conversing, talking together ; but 
it certainly expresses somewhat more intimate 
than this : it denotes an interchange of thought 
and feeling : a participation in each other's 
nature : an oneness. Communion with God 
is the passing of the infinite into the finite : the 
becomino; of one : the union of beino^. 

Prayer is petition : the less asks of the 
greater : give to me, it says, of thy greatness. 
God is perpetual Giver : he exists in impart- 
ing : he is the fount from whence all draw, 
the ether of life in which all float, the father, 
the mother, creator and nourisher : all creation 
prayeth, give, give : every tree and cloud and 
bird and grass-blade prayeth : all thirst, and 
are never slaked : the more is given, the mor# 
wanted, the more answered, the more asked : 
God is giver — creation, receiver. As God is by 
nature giver, prayer is the attitude of recep- 
tion, or it is that act of the soul which is recep- 
tion. The sun sheds out light and heat, gives 



COMMUNION. 105 

himself away continually, gives his life unto his 
world ; but even in his world there is a condi- 
tion to receiving : the flower that closes its 
corolla tightly over its seed-vessels, laments in 
vain that they perish of cold and want. Prayer 
is that action of the mind or heart by which it 
obtains what it needs. It is effort in all forms. 
It precedes communion because it is the con- 
dition to reception. The exercise of the intel- 
lect or will is prayer, because it is the mode 
of obtaining increase of power : it is fulfilling 
the condition that pervades the universe ; that 
use gives increase : the use of any thing is the 
prayer for more. Yet God is a free giver : 
he imparts whether men ask or ask not ; obe- 
dience or disobedience, use or disuse, make no 
difference in his bounty, but only in the capa- 
city of the recipient : the sun-rays flow as 
freely upon the closed blossom as the open, but 
the former suffers for the warmth and light 
that sinks into the bosom of the latter. God is 
free, but man lives under conditions ; he who 
would have the influx of thought, must be true 
to the laws of the intellect ; he who would re- 
ceive of the holy, must live to the law of the 
holy : to have thought is to think, to grow holy 
9 



1Q6 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

is to be holy. There is no prayer but the 
doing or being that for which the prayer is 
made : he receives, who has : the having is the 
prayer, the receiving is the communion. 
Study is the prayer of the intellect, effort the 
prayer of the will : love is the heart's prayer, 
seeking to incorporate into itself more and 
more of the being of God. 

Communion, which is the reception of the in- 
finite, the incoming of truth and love into the 
soul, the partaking of the nature of God, is the 
end or object of prayer ; and any mode in 
which this is sought, whether through thought 
or word, or will or deed, is to pray. He who 
searches for truth, or seeks to arrest the van- 
ishing lines of beauty, or to embody in the ob- 
scurest manner the sentiment of duty, or even 
through hand and arm, brings order out of 
disorder, harmony from confusion, is in that 
attitude of reception in which the infinite com- 
munes with the finite : his act, any act that 
seeks to embody a divine idea, is a prayer ; so 
the commonest action of life, if done from a 
thought, a sentiment, a principle, is holy as 
the loftiest ; the circle of action that the seraph 
treads, is no more celestial than that of the 
humblest earth-drudge, if the latter be de- 



COMMUNION. 107 

scribed from the same divine centre. Order 
is a divine idea : amid the intricacy of crea- 
tion it reigns supreme. There is a place for 
every thing in God's universe ; though there 
is indeed no where to him, as there is no 
whence, though he transcends place himself, 
yet he places all that proceeds forth from him ; 
and the mode of his placing or arranging we 
call order; therefore is order divine. The 
little worm keeps his place, and the sun his, 
and the planets theirs, and the child, in the ar- 
rangement of his toys and pictures, is seeking 
to appropriate a divine idea. God is with him 
at his sports. And what is all science and 
philosophy but the eifort to reduce disorder to 
order, to bring unity from intricacy, to enter 
into that divine secret by which the universe 
is scaled and measured. 

True prayer is of use ; it does really get 
the thing it asks for. Prayer is effort in all 
forms, and these efforts are the modes it seeks 
advance in thought and love. We receive the 
advance in ihe effort. We cannot think with- 
out increasing the capacity of thought, nor 
love, without deepening the power of love. 
Thought and love are given in their exercise. 
But in efforts or prayers, after temporary or 



108 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

finite good, the law is not equally certain, be- 
cause we have to take in the element of the 
finite, which is not immutable, and so makes 
our calculation unsure. The seeker of wealth 
is not sure of its attainment, nor the ambitious 
of the success of his plans, because there are 
myriad interfering causes over which he has 
no control. My efforts after finite good con- 
flict perhaps with yours, and so they necessarily 
limit each other. We begin the day, and 
cannot be sure of the success of any finite good 
after which we may try, because the finite is 
necessarily subject to limit and obstruction, is 
dependent on other finite things. A pleasure 
party is spoiled by a shower, or a journey is 
delayed by an accident ; no event or action 
can be independent or isolated : it is inter- 
woven with every thing else ; so that " there is 
no dependence on any thing" has become a 
proverb. In the outward world we are but 
very limited sovereigns. Our way is disputed 
at every step ; but as we retreat inwards to 
the world of thouorht and feelino^, do we breathe 
a freer atmosphere. You may gain as much 
thought as you will, it cannot impede my ad- 
vancement in thought, nor the utmost spread of 
my affections cannot encroach on the depth of 



COMMUNION. 109 

yours, because we here move in an infinite 
sea : we are not subject to space or time ; 
the calculations we make are above change or 
error. If I seek thought, I know I shall have 
thought, because thought is infinite, and not 
subject to contingencies: the daily bread of 
thought and the wine of love always comes by 
the exercise of the intellect and affections. In 
the spiritual world, all are peers of the realm ; 
not that the measure of all is equal ; but all 
are equally sure of their appropriate share. 
All feed on or commune with God, the genius 
and the fool ; the genius bountifully, the fool 
sparingly ; but each takes what he can bear. 
This great fact of the communion of divinity 
with humanity has been appropriately symbol- 
ized by man, in the sacramental bread and 
wine. This seems to have been its ancient 
significance, not a commemoration of the life 
and death of Jesus of Nazareth. Beautiful 
and becoming as were the expressions of love 
and reverence, for holy worth, and heroic sac- 
rifice, yet were such more appropriately ex- 
pressed by an offering than by a partaking. ^* I 
feed on God," says the pious Catholic, and says 
truly : the soul does feed on God in the imbi- 
bing of truth and love : ** when I partake of the 
9* 



110 



STUDIES IN RELI&ION. 



sacramental bread," he adds, and there con- 
founds the sign with the thing signified : the 
last being but the occasional symbol of the 
continual fact. The Protestant seems to reject 
the fact and retain the symbol, to express a 
quite different and certainly lower fact, for 
glorious as is the truth, that one son of God 
lived a divine life, and died a martyr to his di- 
vinity, it is not so sublime, as that God is 
every moment imparting power to each indi- 
vidual soul, to bear his baptism and share in 
his glory. 

Whenever the intellect receives truth, 
through its natural exercise, whenever the 
heart fills with love, through the movement of 
the affections and sympathies, then does the 
soul commune with God, receive from him, as 
the flower and the opal, receive and appropri- 
ate from the sun : and in this giving of himself, 
God is no respecter of persons. He gives to all 
freely, and lets each one take according to his 
power : the strong cannot take more than his 
share, nor the weak less: the lofty cannot 
overtop the lowly, nor the lowly undersink the 
high ; the great ocean of light penetrates all, 
even into the crevices of the rocks, into the 
veins of the leaf, into the subterraneous caverns 



COMMUNION. Ill 

of the earth : God's life makes the flower 
bloom, the jewel shine, the child live and grow : 
one is not dearer than another, but all are 
infinitely dear, lie equally near the infinite 
bosom, the genius and fool, the sinner and the 
saint; from the view-point of God, all are 
equal ; from the view-point of man are infinite 
diversities, and so we talk of God's love and 
hate, approval and wrath, but this is the break- 
ing up of the white light from the stand-point 
of humanity : in God, all live, and move, and 
have their beino;. 



STAR-CHILD. 

In a pleasant chamber, close beside 
A lofty window, deep and wide. 
Stood a little bed, in whose bosom deep 
A young boy went to his nightly sleep. 
The window was as a crystal door, 
Opening out on the silent night ; 
And the radiance of the clear star-light 
Lay in white streaks on the chamber floor, 



112 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

And shone on the pillow and the bed. 
And brightened the sleeper's beautiful head. 

And all the night, as one by one, 

The shining stars went up the sky, 

They paused and looked through that window high^ 

And as each and every star in turn, 

Like a crown of silver lustre shone. 

Round the head of the boy, more still and deep, 

More starry and bright, grew his innocent sleep. 

One night he awoke ; and one star, alone. 
Through that lofty casement was shining down j. 
He gazed, and he gazed, till it grew like an eye, 
Placid and clear, in the midnight sky ; 
Then the boy looked trustfully up, and smiled, 
And the star looked brightly back to the child. 

The morrow, he went to his pictures and play. 
But ever and often he turned him away, 
And smiled to his thought, as though a fair dreamf 
Were passing him and his sports between ; 
The mother questions him gently the while, 
" Why does my boy look upward and smile T' 
*' Oh mother, oh mother, I would you might see 
The beautiful angel that's watching ra,e.'^ 



SONSHIP. 113 



SONSHIP. 

In the remarkable life of Jesus of Nazareth, 
it is related that he justifies a certain course of 
his conduct, by quoting the example of God, 
his Father. The by-standers are incensed 
that he calls God his Father ; because, in so 
doing, he makes himself equal with God. 
What could they mean by this ? What kind 
of equality is supposed between parent and 
child ? Not that of authority, for authority is 
rightful power ; and power depends on the 
depth and extent of one's knowledge ; and 
knowledge is the fruit of experience ; and, as 
superiority of age gives larger experience, it 
pre-supposes higher knowledge. There is no 
equality between parent and child, but that of 
nature : the offspring is of the same nature 
as the original ; the young bird is of the na- 
ture of the bird ; the slip of the plant of the 
kind of the plant ; the child has the humanity 
of his parent-man ; the child-god receives the 
god-nature ; and so Jesus, in calling God his 
Father, asserted the oneness of his nature with 



114 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

him : and this was what the Jews brought 
against Jesus, that he said he was God's son, — 
not his servant, nor dependant, nor acquaint- 
ance, nor even friend, — but his son, of his very 
lineage, nearest possibly related to him. Jesus 
did not deny the accusation, but accepted and 
enlarged upon it. 

What is God ? Infinite spirit. What must 
all other spirit than God be ? Finite. What is 
finite spirit ? Spirit subject to laws, limitations, 
limited, bounded. God is unbounded spirit, 
unlimited. Humanity is the infinite, subject 
to laws or limits, become finite. No finite can 
transcend the law of the finite and continue 
finite. No man can become God without ceas- 
ing to be man. The relation Jesus bears to in- 
finite spirit, is that of less to the greater. The 
finite can have no absolute existence apart 
from the infinite ; it exists by reception of the 
infinite. Jesus, who is finite, sustains the re- 
lation of receiver to God, who is infinite, and 
consequently giver. He is the son or recipi- 
ent of God. Born into human form, hunger- 
ing, thirsting, sorrowing, suffering, tempted, 
triumphing, he bore the limitations of the fi- 
nite, — the finite manifestation of the infinite 
manifestator, the visible son of the invisible 



SONSHIP. 115 

Father, the sent man of the sending God. 
We, too, are derived spirit ; not being, existing 
from our own will, but as it is given to us ; 
not absolute, primary, but with somewhat 
above or behind us, or overhead. We, as re- 
lative, derived spirit, sustain the relation to ab- 
solute, primary spirit, or God, of sons, — recipi- 
ents. As Jesus is also son, he is then to us 
brother. No matter how more or less exalted, 
that is not now the question ; but, if absolute 
spirit is father, and he and we are derived, 
are sons, then are we brothers. All created 
beings must be brothers, in the fact, that they 
are sons to one uncreated being. God alone 
is Father : all creation is brotherhood, from 
the highest to the lowest ; from Jesus, " the 
beloved," "the only," to Judas, the low, the 
condemned; from the genius, rich in the 
gifts of intellect, learned in the past, and 
discerning of the future, to the poor fool who 
scarce knows his mother's name : all are 
brethren, sons, receivers, and God is the 
Father and giver to all. 

As Jesus is of the same race as ourselves, 
not a son of angels, but a son of man, then 
all that he could assert as actually true of 
himself, n\ust be true, possibly, of all men. 



116 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

All that he was, each can be : possessing 
one nature, all possess the same capabilities. 
Admit the New Zealander into the rank of 
humanity, and admit Jesus into it, and we 
make the lowest savage capable of becom- 
ing Jesus, through virtue of possessing the 
same powers and tendencies. The loftiest in 
the gifts of head and heart, cannot escape 
from the bond that unites them to the low- 
est. There seems vast diversity in humanity ; 
a diversity that must needs eiface its unity. 
What has the poor savage, whose thought 
is, at best, a glimmering twilight, in com- 
mon with him who stands beside him, with 
a brow like a god's, and a knowledge that 
has taken possession of the lower world, and 
apportioned it a place and name ? And be- 
tween these distant points are interminable 
varieties. Some are born kings in the world 
of mind, possessing supremacy from their 
cradle, asking leave of none, but assigning 
all things after their own law ; modelling cus- 
toms, society, religion, after their own thought. 
So are there lords and princes, each in their 
beautiful sphere, giving and having where- 
with to give, calm, complacent, full : then fol- 
low the tribe of beggars of the heart and 



SONSHIP. 117 

mind ; some unashamed, indifferent lo their 
poverty ; others, again, tortured by it, ready 
to rise upon the monopolizers of thought, and 
ask, Why, oh poet, why, oh prophet, art thou 
full and clothed, and we naked and hungry ? 
Surely, there is no equality in nature. Is 
not one stone from her laboratory clear, beau- 
tiful, reflective of the rays of the immeasurable 
sun, an agate, a cornelian, a topaz, and 
another, dull, worthless grey pebble, lying by 
the road-side ? Does not one star differ from 
another? Is the gnarly shrub of the same 
lineage as the graceful elm ? Oh, miserable 
savin, with your twisted, stunted branches, 
dost not shrink before the regal chesnut, 
the far-spreading oak ? Far and wide go out 
their leaves for the inhaling of the atmos- 
phere ; in what large draughts do they take 
it in ; but as for thee, a little sufficest thee. 
And what tie is there between genius and 
mediocrity ? Genius, the gift of thought, 
the blending of the divine with the human, 
the partaking of the essence of God, the be- 
coming another person in the Trinity. It knows 
no want, for it is the maker of wealth : it 
dwells in the palaces of thought ; wanders in 
10 



118 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

gardens of love ; worships in temples of il- 
limitable arch, to the swell of organs of un- 
fathomable sound. All outward objects are 
to it an infinite succession of mirrors, repeat- 
ing and reflecting every other, according to 
the light, the form, the position. In the con- 
scious fulness of power, genius can revel in 
the " Syrian sweets of leisure ;" he is not a 
slave, at his task, a hireling at his labor, but 
sits as a prince at the banquet ; not driven to 
snatch a fearful hour, lest his opportunity 
vanish, but infinite time and space are his; 
he has leisure for smiles and sport, and play- 
fulness : he does not toil for his daily bread of 
thought ; it comes to him as he wishes it. Yet 
let this god deny himself to be the son of man, 
seek, ever so little, to escape from the mesh 
of humanity that environs him, and it tells 
back fearfully upon him in weakness and doubt, 
in care and pain. Let not the weak in will, 
the feeble in mind, bow down with any un- 
manly awe, before the great of intellect and 
virtue. What are they there for, but as bea- 
cons to the race — but to show to every indi- 
vidual that shares in their nature, that such is 
his own possibility ? Could not Peter walk the 
water, like his lord ? Ah, he was weak then ; 



SONSHIP. 119 

another time he shall have more strength. 
Genius and virtue have but entered upon their 
inheritance in advance. The record of their 
life and consciousness is the mirror in which 
we may behold our future glory. How inter- 
esting are these glimpses into our destiny. 
How should we bless these angel faces that 
smile and beckon to us here and there, from 
out the clouds of mortal life. 

Jesus accepts the fact, that he is son of God. 
But, what then ? " The son can do nothing of 
himself." The human soul is ever a child, 
nursing at the fount of infinity ; but as it re- 
ceives and knows, so does it do. I can neither 
think nor act without God, says Jesus ; but so 
much power of thought and action as he gives 
me : just so much as I comprehend of internal, 
spiritual power, or see of the Father, just so 
much I do ; for the Father loveth the son, and 
lets him into the secret of his doing ; and he 
will increase his revelation, and unknowing 
men will marvel. Man is capable of putting 
forth spiritual power, only so far as he is con- 
scious of and comprehends its action in his 
own soul ; he sees how the Father works, and 
then works himself. The products of genius, 
the acts of the saint, often astonish others. 



120 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

Men have not yet done marvelling at Jesus of 
Nazareth. To a work of art, a picture, a 
poem, we say. How extraordinary ! To the 
artist, it was the most natural thing in the 
world ; he is possessor of the power : the poet 
knows the secret of his poem ; he stands be- 
hind the curtain : so the possessor of spiritual 
energy, is conscious of the action and power 
of spirit ; he feels that it is all-pervading, and 
puts it forth in act, and proves that it is all- 
prevailing ; for " what things soever the 
Father doeth, these also doeth the son." 

This working of man after God, this doing 
in word and act what he does in the soul, 
is a wonderful fact, that is a key to many 
things. It explains men's confidence in prin- 
ciples. You will hear some eloquent enthusi- 
ast say. What use of bars and bolts ? Away 
with the jail and halter ; the criminal can be 
won, improved, transfigured, by patience and 
love. Another cannot shake that man's faith 
in this, though he sneer, and bring him face to 
face with the ruffian, and ask. What tender- 
ness and fairness can do to a rock like that ? 
He knows the use God has made of these very 
means in his own soul. We always appeal to 
that in another which is most predominant in 



SONSHIP. 121 

ourselves ; and to just such a degree as a prin- 
ciple or sentiment has power in our own bo- 
som, do we trust to its action in another's : we 
use that out of us which God uses within us. 
If you are of tender sensibilities, easily won 
by love, you will appeal to the heart of 
another ; if integrity is sovereign in your own 
inner world, you will trust to its power over a 
companion. All actions flowing from high and 
noble principles, are the putting forth of what 
men are conscious of in their own soul. And 
the reason why our life is so feeble and imper- 
fect, arises from the torpidity of our moral na- 
ture. We do not feel the action of God within 
us ; and how can we act after him ? We are 
surprised when some noble brother does great 
and beautiful actions. We cannot conceive 
what prompted or empowered him. Possibly 
we are tempted to deduct from their greatness. 
We say, no one could be thus self-denying, 
thus soul-empowered: some lower motive 
must have mingled with the life ; or, if the 
fact be indeed so, then it is no man, — it is a 
grand and solitary being, isolated from all 
companionship, and severed forever from the 
entwining heart of humanity. Alas, we do not 
10* 



122 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

know the consciousness of the power and suf. 
ficiency of spirit, that God infuses into some of 
his beloved. A good man knows that love, 
faith, honor are ; he acts upon that knowledge. 
In another, these contend feebly with indi- 
vidual passion and outward circumstance : he 
does not do like God, because he does not see 
God do. And not only does the Father show 
of His power unto the son, but if we will but 
observe the mode of God's workings within us, 
we may learn many of His softer attributes. 
Years are we making a single attainment, and 
yet His patience is inexhaustible. We make 
resolutions, and break them, — ascend a few 
steps, and then sink even lower than before : 
it would seem as if we must needs give up ; 
but softly, invisibly, mysteriously, is infused 
within us the hope of amendment, of recovery, 
— the spirit to try again ! What should we 
do, if, after our failures, we were debarred 
from this wonderful panacea of trying again ? 
It is very touching, — it brings both smile and 
tear, to see this eternal hope, which always 
soars, like a white dove, from under the sha- 
dow of every disappointment, so white, so fresh, 
as if its wings were cleansed anew, in the 
darkness out of which it came ; the hope that 



SONSHIP. 123 

is like a courageous word, like a suddenly 
thronging thought of spring-time, like a walk 
in the cool air on an autumn mountain-side ; 
the hope that something yet will be, that the 
ocean of futurity is yet filled with pearls for 
the successful diver, that nature is yet rich, 
and God lavish, as of old, and one's meed not 
utterly overdone. And whence this continu- 
ally reviving hope in ourselves ? It comes 
from the quiet patience of God, his infinite 
toleration : he seems to sit serenely above, and, 
half smilingly, watch us at our game of life, 
which to us, indeed, is no game, but a battle 
field, where one must do or die. It would be 
well, indeed, if we should copy after some of 
this gentle forbearance: we do not tolerate 
each other's faults, — do not give each other 
leave nor scope to try again. Singular, that 
the all-perfect is the least exacting, and God 
should be the only truly tolerant being in His 
universe. 

This fact of man's working out of him what 
God works in him, lets us into the secret 
of all spiritual power. There is no limit to 
the son's power but the Father's revelation. 
Jesus acted spontaneously on the faith of the 
sovereignty of mind over the body, of the 



124 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

magic of a strong mind upon a weak one, 
whose secret lies in the conscious action and 
energy of spirit ; for the Father giveth to the 
son like powers to himself. Do you reject the 
sonship of the human race, because it makes 
man equal with God ? Yet man, Jesus argues, 
can do nothing, unless God give unto him ; 
and can only work truly in so far as he sees 
and repeats the Father's workings. God giv- 
eth to the spirit of man the power of awaken- 
ing life, and the authority of judgment, that he 
judges as God judges ; and so this humanity 
is to be honored, even as the Father who origi- 
nated it. He who does not reverence his own 
nature, does not reverence God. As God 
works in the soul, imparting strength, infusing 
hope, awakening, encouraging, the giver of 
life, and the just discerner, so are we bound in 
word and act to be quickness of life, the in- 
spirers of hope, the judge of evil, powerful 
and pure, because our individual supremacy is 
not our object, but the supremacy of the Eternal 
goodness. 

The sonship of the soul in God is indeed the 
primal truth. Jesus asks Nicodemus, very 
pointedly, if he is a " Master in Israel," and 
has not learned this initiatory fact, of the inspi- 



SONSHIP. 125 

ration of the individual soul. Man is the re- 
cipient of God : in the reach of thought, in the 
expansion of love, we imbibe His nature. 
Thence the sublimity of thought, thence the 
sadness of deep emotion. Jt is as if the finite 
bowed before the infinite, as if the stream of 
time ebbed at the overflowing of the eternal 
ocean. 

"Can such things be, 
And overcome us, like a summer's cloud, 
Without our special wonder T' 

But what proofs of this ? " If I bear witness to 
myself," said Jesus, "my witness is not true.'' 
If man says he is the son of God, the doubter may 
ask for his credentials. If the rose lift its head, 
and aver, I am the queen of the flowers, the 
favorite of summer, the bride of the nightin- 
gale, its compeers have a right to say, Bring 
your witnesses. Great claims need broad tes- 
timony. 

Now, what witnesses does Jesus produce ? 
His life and his Father. What he does, and 
whence he is. It is the appeal of a noble, I 
had almost said a proud spirit, using the word 
in its loftiest sense, as consciousness of great- 
ness. The notion of individual supremacy 
a feeling of pretension, founded on one's pos- 



126 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

session more or less over his fellow, is certain- 
ly as paltry as it is absurd. If we give wing 
to our fancy, and see our earth spinning like 
a child's ball, on its path in infinite space, and 
to this plaything of an earth, the mounts and 
valleys, in proportion as the inequalities on the 
surface is to the globe of an orange, and seek 
to descry the insect tribe of man, creeping on 
the outside of this ball, and then recollect the 
still minuter distinctions that separate one 
individual of these from another, we may 
easily conjure up a picture, at which, per- 
chance, the angels laugh. But one fact re- 
deems the human race from this insignificance, 
and makes it peer with the powers of heaven ; 
and that lies in its origin. Man is great, be- 
cause greatly born: seen in the "grinding 
press of worlds," he is indeed an insect, a fly 
upon the wheel; recognised as the imbiber of 
the life of God — he, too, is a god, and may 
assert, with dignity, the highest claims. 

Jesus refers to his works as testimony to his 
divinity : " My works bear witness to me." 
What man is, is testified to by what he does. 
It is like the appeal to single combat. If your 
cause is good, prove it by your prowess, and 
God show the right. The sonship of human 



SONSHIP. 127 

nature is established by the life of humanity. 
Love, generosity, heroism, hope, every virtue, 
every aspiration, partakes of the infinite, and 
is necessarily divine. Has a man but a single 
virtue ? That virtue bears witness to his high 
origin ; for all virtues are one in kind, are 
more or less partial developements of the di- 
vine element. The proofs that human nature 
is the offspring of God, lies in that nature it- 
self, in its power and its hope, its tenderness 
and its heroism, its courage and despondency. 
The witness that you and I are, through our 
humanity, children of God, lies in what we 
are and do. Let us not shrink from the ordeal, 
fearful as it seems : if it does not lie in our 
love and endurance, our mental and moral 
strength, then is it borne witness to in our self- 
reproach, our regrets, our aspirations and en- 
deavors. That which I do, said Jesus. Op- 
posed, disliked, martyred, and yet he toiled and 
hoped, and knew, that the infinite would tri- 
umph. What was this but the fact of his di- 
vine origin asserting itself ? His life bore wit- 
ness to his parentage, and so convincingly, that 
men made up the verdict, and said. He is the 
first-born, the inheritor of the Father's like- 
ness. But the youngest born is not less the 



128 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

son than the highest. He who has received 
least of the divine nature, may appeal to the 
workings of that nature, in proof of its divinity. 
Is man the son of God 1 Yes : his life, his 
deeds testify unto him. His conflict with evil, 
his sovereignty over matter, the power that 
survives defeat, the hope that triumphs above 
failure, the faith that conquers death. His 
witnesses gather like angel spirits, '^ thronging 
in the blue air ;" they come from every scene 
of love, ministering to woe, — of weakness, 
struggling with oppression : 

" From the dust of creeds out- worn, 
From the tyrant's banner torn :" 

and from those myriad acts of high devotion 
and generous sacrifice, that carry the glance 
far downward into the great heart of hu- 
manity : 

'' I alit 
On a great ship Ughtning spUt, 
And speeded hither on the sigh 
Of one, who gave his enemy 
His plank, — then plunged aside to die." 

Is human nature, so august, so sacred ? Let 
us remember its crime and hate, its error and 
folly : We will not hide our eyes to these : a 
Judas is not less a fact, in the history of the 



SONSHIP. 129 

race, than a Jesus : man is poor, weak, slavish, 
but who sits thus in judgment upon him ? It 
is he, himself: humanity judges humanity. 
We are at once the accused, and the accuser : 
admit the one, we must admit the other. If 
humanity is sinful, low, frivolous, it is also a 
contemner of the frivolous, a despiser of the 
low, an abhorrer of the sinful : son of God, 
and son of m^an : son of fear, limitation, error : 
son of aspiration, judgment, and faith. 

What other witness does Jesus call ? His 
Father. God must have borne witness to him, 
in his consciousness : in sublimest silence does 
spirit testify to spirit. Jesus knew the power 
within : his evidence is the loftiest : '' What I 
do, and what I know." But ye do not per- 
ceive divinity in my life, he says. Ye do not 
recognise it in kindred consciousness, — then 
in the third and last place, there are your 
scriptures, history, and prophecy, — they testify 
unto me. All lofty and holy writing testifies 
to the authority and dignity of the human soul, 
to the divine hope, and divine faith in humani- 
ty, — that w^hich it can be, and do ; and, there- 
fore, to Jesus as the son of humanity. Ah, no 
redeemer comes unforetold : no great and lov- 
11 



130 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ing spirit takes flesh, in order to succor 
and bless his race, but he finds many who 
have waited patiently to see his glory : no 
star, not even in the horizon of intellect, arises, 
but there are brows that have grown pale in 
watching for its coming. Genius foretels ge- 
nius : virtue is the precursor of a noble line, 
since God is inexhaustible, and man's hope un- 
failing. Is man's life, is his consciousness, 
insufficient proof of his sonship ? Then let 
the record of the wise and good speak, let the 
aspirations and judgments, the hopes and con- 
victions, that make holy the writings of ge- 
nius, utter their word : they testify to humani- 
ty's origin in God. Let us not sever ourselves 
from the bright and holy ones of our race : 
around them should we gather in reverent 
joy : they bring news of home : they tell the 
latest message from the Father. Let us listen 
to what they say, out of their varied experi- 
ence : they speak for us : they tell the secret 
of our own hearts, which we, perhaps, are too 
dull to comprehend, or too dumb to utter. I 
am glad, Jesus announced himself so fearless- 
ly to be the son of God : his attestation goes 
to enrich the testimony, that is borne to the 
sonship of man, from the presence of spirit in 



SONSHIP. 131 

consciousness, the life and deeds of humanity, 
and the record of the wise and good. 



FAITH. 



When Jesus spoke of working after God, those 
that heard him said, '^ What must we do, to 
do like you ?" His statement was remarka- 
ble : " I work as God does, therefore I act 
divinely." Their reply was appropriate, " How 
can our acts become divine ?" 

We are touched by what is tender, generous, 
heroic in life ; traits of love and pity, that 
gleam out often, through the roughest natures, 
hours of high, yet quiet sacrifice, scenes of 
gentle endurance, acts of exceeding valor, 
appeal to our deepest sympathies : we feel that 
the element of the divine is in them. The in- 
trepidity with which some noble spirit passes 
through a life of disappointed expectations and 
unused resources, to the hour when he goes 
up, in a baptismal of fire, to heaven ; the pa- 
tience, with which a young Judean lives and 



132 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

dies, to bear witness to the power and supre- 
macy of the soul ; how do these things move 
us. We know, they are wrought out of the 
material of divinity ; they are still and sub- 
lime as the night, fresh as the flowers, in 
keeping with all nature, and our hearts say, 
we too would be divine : what must we do to 
work these works of God ? Jesus words the 
answer thus : '^ Faith in him, whom he hath 
sent." Who is this ? This is a simple prin- 
ciple, fraught with vast consequences. Who 
or what hath God sent, the faith in which gives 
divineness to individual life ? 

The objects of faith are revealed in the con- 
sciousness : by the ear, we hear, — by the eye, 
see, — but we know thought and love only by 
their presence : spirit announces itself: it says, 
" I am." I can have faith in no power nor 
relationship of spirit, that is not revealed in 
possession or hope ; I can conceive of capaci- 
ties higher, but not adverse to my own : our 
notion of an angel is an idealized man, a hu- 
man being, inexpressibly softened and refined ; 
that of a demon is composed of the bad pas- 
sions of human nature, distorted and exag- 
gerated : I can have no faith that Jesus is the 
son of God, only, as I know through conscious- 



FAITH. 13B 

ness the filial relation of my own soul : and 
this it is, this belief in the power and supre- 
macy of the soul, that gives divineness to 
life : that is, that we act divinely, just so far 
as our actions spring from the faith, — that spirit, 
which is the incoming of God, the fount of 
the joyful and the just, the profound and ten- 
der, is sovereign over all outward things. In 
an heroic act, the hero acts spontaneously on 
the belief, that a thought, a sentiment, an idea, 
invisible as it is, is better than all outward 
success : analyze any morally sublime action, 
and you will see that it is the instinctive acting 
on the faith, that a principle, a feeling, that 
can neither be seen nor handled, is more com- 
manding than life. 

By the running through them of this divine 
element, such deeds are transferred from the 
domain of prose to that of poetry : they make 
the heart beat and the tears come ; the young 
boy, the child, who would not leave his post in 
battle, " without his father's word," perishing 
there in his solitary allegiance, amid the un- 
righteous smoke and din of war, shines upon 
our thought, like an angel : we feel how sa- 
cred is that young heart's enthusiasm, not 
less divine than the hymn of the saint, at 
11* 



134 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

even-tide. And so the commonest act of self- 
sacrifice, the adherence to daily duty, is faith, 
that a thought, a feeling, is supreme over finite 
good : it is the protest of the soul against the 
senses ; nor is this consciousness of the di- 
vinity and supremacy of spirit so rare, as we 
seem to think. It acts darkly, feebly, obscure- 
ly, — but still acts. 

Man is greater than he knows. Multitudes 
have laid down their lives from a sentiment of 
loyalty, of honor : they exchanged life for a 
thought. And for what did Jesus die ? For 
a principle, a fact of consciousness, a feeling; 
more persuasive than the offered '• kingdoms 
of the world, and the glory of them." 

And this is salvation : faith in the soul, as 
the son of God, the Redeemer, the Saviour : 
conviction of its sonship, that however dark, 
obscured, still thought is divine, feeling is di- 
vine. Sensual people hoot at sentiments, at 
principles, at ideas ; they say. Why live for 
them ? Why struggle for them ? They bring 
neither food to eat, nor clothes to wear, neither 
wealth, nor rank, nor popularity. Most true : 
they do not : they have brought a dungeon to 
myriads, beside John Baptist ; they have reared 
many other crosses, than that on Calvary : 



FAITH. 135 

they bring outward defeat to the many, diffi- 
culties sure and varied to all ; but this is the 
condition to divineness of life. He who would 
" win the crown, must bear the cross." He 
who would live to infinite thoughts and prin- 
ciples, must be willing to sacrifice to them, 
finite successes and hopes. In every bosom, 
the son of man must die on the cross, — that 
the son of God may rise from the dead in im- 
mortal life. 

It is no easy thing to be true to principle, to 
have faith in the soul, amid the tumult of the 
senses,—- to trust to its sufficiency, amid their 
importunate cries. He who worships truth, 
must give himself a willing victim, on its al- 
tar : the worshipper must be the devotee : the 
sovereign must be sovereign, absolute, despo* 
tic, exacting. Worship is not a pastime. Who- 
ever makes the ideal his God, under the form 
of truth, or virtue, or art, must minister to it, 
in the calm and exalted spirit of a priest, in 
the gloomy severity of the monk, or the ascetic 
exclusiveness of the hermit. As there is no 
serving of virtue and pleasure, so is there none 
of passion and thought. He who binds him- 
self to the service of thought, must keep the 
lamp burning night and day, before her serene 



186 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

and majestic presence : he must abjure all 
tumultuous emotions, that spring from and 
centre in the finite : he must take the vows of 
his order. Our inefficiency and misery arises 
from the fact, that we are continually breaking 
the vows of our consecration. We fancy our- 
selves free, and pity the deluded ones, who 
bound themselves to an order Augustine or 
Dominic ; but we do all, at some or another 
time, bind ourselves to some or other spiritual 
order. The loftier the spirit, the more austere 
its self-assumed discipline : but these duties 
begin to fret and gall us : these abstinences, 
these confessions, these midnight orisons, these 
weary penances : we break from them, and 
then comes the remorse of broken vows. Ah, 
ardent, young heart ! Choosest thou the majes- 
tic vision of thought, as thy most blessed lady, — 
mother of God, — or the awfulness of virtue, 
wearing its wreath of thorns, like a crown ? 
Noble is thy choice, but with somewhat of 
sadness, I look on thee, devoted to victory or 
death. Little knowest thou the weight of the 
vows thou assumest : thou art bound for life 
and death : fidelity only is salvation, and how 
few are the faithful and true, how few are the 
riders on the white horse ! Nor let any one 



FAITH. 1S7 

account himself free : he is born in the service 
of truth and virtue : and each, sooner or later, 
must assume his post, must receive the oath of 
his allegiance. 

All generous young souls rush gladly into 
this service : '' the beauty of their mistress 
is immense." Perhaps none of us have for- 
gotten, with v^hat whiteness of thought, what 
plenitude of power, we threw ourselves in 
some enraptured moment, at the feet of our 
highest ideal of goodness ! No service seemed 
too great to render : the soul delighted in dan- 
ger and difficulty, as the form of health finds 
in the wintry blast, only a ruddier cheek and 
quicker step ; but, by-and-by, the enthusiasm 
passes, yet we know not that we have wan- 
dered from the side of our God : we sail so 
smoothly on the waters of indulgence, that we 
do not realize that we have even started from 
the shore of safety ; by-and-by, the boat of 
life begins to rock, — we strive to steady it, or 
yield to the violence of its motion : the sun 
has set, the moon and stars give no light : the 
ocean of passion grows deeper and deeper : 
we plunge suddenly into an abyss, — and the 
shock of the precipitous descent awakens us, 
terrified from our dream, while all around us, 



138 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

weltering in the black waters, lie the wreck 
of our broken vows. No, — divineness of life 
is no child's play : it is beautiful and grand : 
but its beauty is often evolved from conflict, 
like the diamond-drops on the foam of the tor- 
rent, and sadness is a primal element of the 
grand. 

Nature is very sportive : the rays of light 
dance together : the flowers fall in love, one 
with the other : the rain-drops take merry 
races, the brooks joke and prattle to the peb- 
bles ; but this is not its whole : far underneath 
the earth spread its massy rocks, fathomless 
rolls its ocean, far oflf, awfully serene, burn its 
unquenchable stars. A character, one with 
nature, must be at once profound and sportive : 
iron-bound in its adherence to principle, and 
changeful as light, in its sensibility to beauty: 
but these solider parts of character are de- 
veloped by effort and endurance. Ease and 
self-indulgence never made a life heroic, di- 
vine : adherence to high thought always en- 
counters obstruction in some form, thence 
comes the name, hero, one that endures, — mar- 
tyr, one that suffers. Faith in the suprema- 
cy of the soul, leads to the subjection of 
outward life. As this announcement of the 



FAITH. 139 

Son is Christianity, so is the cross its most ap- 
propriate symbol. Faith in the infinite al- 
ways wears upon its breast the cross of the 
finite. Yet is the finite not to be despised : it 
is our mother, and her face is fair to look upon, 
ah, even surpassingly fair, — but she is not of 
royal lineage: she is born to serve. Con- 
viction, that thought, sentiment, principle, is 
supreme, is the sent of God, always leads to 
the lying-down for their sakes, of passion and 
interest and ease, — but such sacrifice alone 
gives divineness to life, and when the outward 
is vanquished, that which survives is seen to 
be the son of God. 



^'' I sate, and behold, a white horse.'* 

[John, the Divine.] 

I SAW in the midst of a sunny green plain, 

A beautiful horse, without spur, bit, or rein ; 

And his delicate limbs were white as the snow 

When it shines fresh and smooth, in the morning's new 

glow; 
And his eyes were as bright as bright jewels are, 



140 STUDIES m RELIGION. 

But soft in their lig^lit, as the light of a star: 
And his feet were as fleet as the wing of a bird, 
When it soars o'er the clouds to sing there unheard ; 
And you heard not the sound of his step, as it pass'd, 
For he went like the wind, as silent and fast. 

And the beautiful horse was gentle and mild, 
And he that bestrode was a young, tender child : 
But the mien of the boy was lofty and high, 
And courage and cheer glanced out from his eye ; 
And he shouted aloud and sang in his glee, 
"^Huzza ! who will ride the white courser with me'? " 
And the words and the shout on the waiting air fell^ 
And rang in the ear like the ring of a bell. 

Oh, tell us, thou child of the quick, daring eye, 

That shines like the sun in the blue of the sky, 

On whose forehead is gentleness blended with force, — 

Who shall mount like to thee the snowy white horse 1 

Then came there a voice, as a mother's low song. 

Blent with boj^hood's rough shout, so sweet, yet so strong j 

Forever, and more, to the faithful and true. 

To the gentle and good, the race is to you ! 

But the low and the selfish, and sullen, we scorn, 

Kone such on the neck of the courser are borne, 

But lowly he bows to the truthful and free, 

And bears them aloft, unto victory ! 



DVTY, 



DUTY. 



141 



What is duty ? That which is due or owing. 
In accepting the idea of duty, there is a recog- 
nition of a debt incurred, of the reception of 
somewhat, for which an equivalent is to be 
paid. That which a person asks of nae, may 
or may not be my duty to give ; duty lies be- 
neath or beyond his request ; this cannot cre- 
ate or nullify it ; it is somewhat demanded in 
payment, for somewhat that has been given. 
As soon as we accept the fact of duty, we ac- 
knowledge ourselves in a debt, which is to be 
paid off. Now, when and how, and to whom, 
was this debt incurred ? None of us can stand 
up and say, I am free ; I owe no one anything ; 
I owe no man, nor woman, nor child, nor God, 
thought, or word, or deed ; I am independent of 
all ; I owe nothing. If I owe nothing, I have 
received nothing ; and if I have received no- 
thing, then am I self-created, self-preserved : 
to renounce the fact of duty is to appropriate 
that of primitive, original being. The first 
12 



142 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

foundation of duty lies in the fact, that we are 
derivative beings, that we have received ; and 
for this reception, we are called on to pay. 
We come into the world in debt; the first 
dawn of the moral nature is the dawn of the 
sense of duty : the first moral fact, the young 
soul perceives, is the fact of liability : the first 
moral consciousuess is that of something to be 
paid off, a debt incurred, before consciousness, 
involuntarily incurred : it seems like a fatal 
plunge, we had made in the dark, and only 
when the light comes, do we see how deep we 
are immersed : and this feeling of indebtedness 
deepens as the moral consciousness deepens : 
it covers us more and more, until the saint feels 
that he is mortgaged, soul and body, life and 
death, for time past, and time future. 

Now, to whom, or what, is the soul thus in- 
debted ? Who is this immense creditor ? 
Every being or thing, from which we have re- 
ceived aught and have not paid for it : and this 
makes the responsibility of the soul, that it lays 
all under contribution to it : it comes, like a sov- 
ereign, taking every thing of which it has need, 
here, there, everywhere, — blameless, fearless, 
lawless, — but it wakes, and finds that it is not 
sovereign, but every, the least thing, from 



DUTY. 143 

which it has taken aught, is standing by, de- 
manding payment. All existence, from God, 
the infinite, to the worm or flower, arrays itself 
before the young soul, in the bursting of its 
consciousness, as a claimant : thence is it, 
that the sense of duty, when first awakened, is 
so painful often : the soul is overwhelmed : it 
feels unequal to meet its responsibilities : it deems 
itself a bankrupt. A debt, then incurred, with 
or before the dawn of moral consciousness, ex- 
tending to all existences, with which we come 
in contact, and due, for value received by us, — 
this is the wide and intricate web of duty : dark 
in its origin, fearful in its extent, mysterious in 
its nature. Oh, young soul ! Child-sovereign, 
prince and beggar ! Whence so regal, yet sa 
involved : whence so innocent and wondering, 
with the whole universe calling on thee, and 
thou forced to admit its claim ! I marvel 
not, that the beauty of childhood is touched 
with seriousness : that its heart beats in 
quick sympathy with the tragic and melan- 
choly : that there is magic to it, in the tale of 
stern effort and baffled hope : it is, itself, a 
tragedy., a creature born to immense expecta- 
tions, to find they have all been forestalled, 
and it must again pay for its own. 



144 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

But, that which I have received, uncon- 
sciously, involuntary, why am I bound for ? A 
debt incurred without my knowledge or con- 
sent, connot be binding on me. This charac- 
ter lies in the nature of that we receive. That 
which the soul receives, being: in itself infinite, 
cannot become the property of the individual : 
cannot be appropriated, as right, by any one : 
belonging, primarily to the infinite, the whole, 
all selfish appropriation of it brings the sense of 
usurpation and guilt. For what are these pos- 
sessions of the soul ? Light, love. They may 
he reduced to these two, — light, love. Now, I 
cannot appropriate these, any more than I can 
sun-light and sun-heat standing beneath the 
arch of Heaven. Light and love are not mine, 
are not thine ; and yet again, they are mine, 
they are thine : belonging to all, they belong 
to no one, and yet belonging to each, they be- 
long to all. Recipient, then, of light and love, 
I am recipient of that which I cannot retain 
without robbery : it is mine to receive, as being 
one, in the infinite bundle of life : it is not 
mine to keep, because I am but one, and not 
the whole : just so much as I keep to selfish 
uses, am I a robber of the universal inheritance, 
and the soul bears uneasily the consciousness 



DUTY. 145 

of this. The soul, then, in virtue of its being 
a living soul, possessed of light and love, is 
bound to transmit this light and love, of which 
it has become the involuntary possessor : it is 
dangerous to turn to private and domestic uses,, 
the divine fire : it becomes a wasting confla- 
gration ; if we lay, sacrilegious hands on it, we 
are stricken with leprosy for our presumption : 
we receive it with awe, we must pass it off 
with awe, and quickly, for who can shut up 
within himself, the fire of God^ and not be con- 
sumed ? To every being, who has given it to us, 
must we give it back again, with clean and 
quick hands: we hold it, at our peril. 
The soul, the recipient of that which cannot 
be appropriated to selfish ends, without destroy- 
ing the sacrilegious appropriator, incurs the re- 
sponsibility of paying off or imparting to others, 
measure for measure, that which it receives 
from each and all : and the debt must be paid 
in its own kind : the infinite cannot be replaced 
by the finite : we cannot receive gold and pay 
out brass, without sin and shame : we cannot, 
guiltless, palm off the spurious for the real, and 
for love and light, infinite, not appropriable, di- 
vine in their essence, we cannot exchange the 
perishing and finite : neither is there any prior- 
12* 



146 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ity in the claims one being makes upon us over 
another : that of good, which an angel imparts 
to us, may be more, but cannot be of different 
nature, from that imparted by the fool, and the 
claim of the first is no more binding than that 
of the last : failure to each or either, brings the 
sense of guilt : we see reproach in our brother's 
eye : we cannot look him in the face, because 
we owe him somewhat, — we are keeping back 
his just claim : thus the low and ignorant 
tyrannize over the wise and learned : it is not 
compassion they ask, but right they claim : so, 
the face we meet in passing, the look of want 
or woe that we may encounter in a crowd, 
haunts us, we know not why : we cannot shut 
it from our dreams : we seem to have got 
something from that individual, that does not 
belong to us, to keep : his look reproaches us : 
we turn in anguish from our consciences, as 
though we were a thief. 

The sense of duty is, then, this conscious- 
ness of possessing somev/hat which cannot be 
retained to selfish uses, and which must be paid 
away in kind. This debt consists of the very 
possessions of the soul, and these possessions 
are thus inappropriable, because in their na- 
ture infinite, of that mysterious element in 



DUTY. 147 

which all existence is involved, and to whose 
encircling unity we give the name of God. 
Humanity holds a joint inheritance from God : 
only an inheritance, indivisible, in which ap- 
propriation is usurpation, and the highest, for 
every thing which he takes, is responsible to 
the lowest. 

Duty, then, is infinite, extending to all be- 
ings, and including all possession. Have I 
then a right to nothing ? I, too, am one of the 
heirs of God. I make my claim on all beings 
and on all time. I protest against any portiorl 
of good withholden from me ; my desires are 
infinite, I protest against all usurpation from 
myself, as from others: to my share of my 
father's wealth, I have a claim : I have rights 
as well as duties : if I owe, I am also owed 
unto : as I would not defraud, neither would I 
be defrauded. 

How are these conflicting claims to be har- 
monized, in which all are debtors and all cre- 
ditors ? I know not, and yet some great souls 
have a way of acting in this matter that 
charms the heart and imagination — that of 
postponing their claims to the fulfilment of 
their obligations, — of saying. What owe I you? 
rather than What owest thou me ? They go on 



148 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the plan of forgiving debts and paying duties ; 
and in the awakening of the moral conscious- 
ness, the sense of indebtedness quite over- 
whelms the sense of rights. Perhaps it is not 
so ; perhaps our rights run parallel with our 
duties, as certainly our debts are measurable 
by our rights, and yet in the flashings of spirit 
it is always the sense of duty that is felt most 
acutely : the soul dares not ask for its right, 
until it has paid its due ; it blushes to demand 
what it refuses to give. 

And in this instinct of the generous soul, 
may lie the very union of the opposing powers. 
All good, under whatever form given or taken, 
by head or hand, to body or mind, is resolva- 
ble in the bestowment of light and love ; the 
outward deed is the sign and body of the invi- 
sible principle. All duty consists in the trans- 
mission of so much light and love as is in us, 
to all beings with whom we come in contact : 
it is theirs as well as ours, and theirs to the 
extent, they can receive and we give. This 
is our duty. Now, how get our right, which is 
all the light and love for which we have capa- 
city ? There is wisdom in the saying, " Let 
us do our duty, and leave the rest with God ;" 
let us pay what we owe, and He will take care 



DUTY, 149 

that we are paid unto ; for love and light being 
the element in which we have our being, as we 
exist in the air, do, like atmospheric light and 
air, continually seek equilibrium. This 
breath of the soul spreads here and there, 
where there is no obstruction; that which 
transmits it receives it ; and that which re- 
ceives it, most easily transmits it, most readily. 
Love and wisdom are never given without 
equivalent ; every thing produces after its 
kind ; love begets love — offices of love pro- 
duce offices of love — smiles, smiles — gentleness, 
gentleness — activity, activity. It is just so with 
knowledge : let us tell what we know, and we 
are told unto : gifts go to the giver : the rich 
have the most presents, so the rich in know- 
ledge learn the most, the rich in love are the 
most beloved : we always receive of that 
which we have, so true is that enigma of Jesus, 
*^ To him that hath, shall be given." Always 
of that which we have the most, do we re- 
ceive the most ; and, I think, this comes from 
the continual flux and reflux of spirit : the air 
rushes in to fill up the vacuum, and it always 
takes the form of the vacuum it fills : give we 
forth love, it comes back love, or knowledge, it 
comes back knowledge. 



150 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

If, then, our duty consist in the constant 
transmission of the infinite element of Good, in 
which we lie encircled, as motes float in the 
sun-beam, or feathers in the air, it follows that 
we can only give so much as we have ; our 
duty is measured by our capability : if I have 
received stintedly, I am not required to give 
largely, or if I have received largely, it is 
robbery to impart stintedly. No being's duty 
can be measured by another's, but only by his 
own capability : that race may be swift to a 
man which is slow for an eagle, but the man's 
speed must be measured by man's power : 
each one must be weighed in his own balance : 
and there is another point not less important — 
one person's mode of duty is not measurable by 
another's. Spirit is one, but it appears under 
the two forms of love and knowledge, and these 
agrain have infinite varieties of manifestation. 
How various are the forms of beauty, — it is 
now a cloud, now a flower, now a human eye, 
then again a heroic action, and again, a 
shell on the sea-shore ; and love, how infinite 
are its forms — a look, a tone, a life-service, a 
cross on Calvary, or a welcoming smile ; and 
knowledge — the modes of imparting it are as 
various as the things to be known ; and what 



DUTY. 151 

is there to be known ? All that was, all that 
is, all that is to come ; all that each or any 
have heard or known, or foreseen : knowledge is 
infinite, and love is infinite, because spirit, of 
which they are modes, are infinite. How nar- 
row and ignorant are those who would bind 
all to one mode of duty, to one form of service ! 
He who feeds the hungry and clothes the 
naked, accuses of selfishness and indolence 
one who ministers to the wit or quickens the 
fancy, and yet the vacant mind and uncul- 
tured imagination are as real evils, and as 
really to be met as cold and hunger, and he 
who can give his mite to the one, is as bound to 
offer it as he who can help the other. We 
make our standard of important duties, and 
judge conditions and opportunities by it. I do 
not believe in this : I do not believe in the re- 
sponsibility of one station over another, nor in 
the importance of one class of duties over 
another. One person is no more useful than 
another, provided that each is a living soul, 
living the life that is in him. There may be 
drones, indeed, those who imprison God's light 
by walls of self, and ease, and habit ; but for 
every living soul there is an infinite activity. 
If there is, then, no choice in the mode of good 



152 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

to be done, but one is as high, dignified, and 
important as another, what shall guide us in 
our choice of action ? That mode of action 
is the true one to which we most tend, by word 
or deed, by head or hand ; that which we do 
with most skill, ease and will, which we do 
most when thinking of duty least, which has 
most nature in it, and so has most God in it : 
the activity, in short, which is our activity and 
not another's. Will any one scorn it ? Let 
him carry his scorn before God. We do as 
we are bid ; if one like it not, let him blame 
the bidder. And is not this spontaneous ac- 
tion the only real doing of God's will ? What 
is this will of God about which men talk so 
fluently, yet so separately, as if it were some- 
thing narrow, arbitrary, oppressive ? Why 
has the phrase come to have such a muffled, 
burial sound, and seem quite inappropriate to 
mingle with the smiles and toils of household 
life, flowers and studies, rambles and poetry. 
If it mean anything, it is for " human nature's 
daily food." If there is any thing for us to 
do, we will not be summoned to it by the toll 
of a bell, but by the ringing out of a merry 
peal. 

The will of God to the individual, as the 



DUTY. 153 

race, lies in the nature of the individual as of 
the race : and this nature consists in a certain 
order of capabilities, more or less extended. 
He wills me to be what he has given me power 
to be. But I do not know all I can be : I do 
not know the ultimate of my powers ; if I did, 
I should know 'my entire destiny. I can evi- 
dently only find out what I am to be, by being. 
I can only learn what I am designed to do, by 
doing what I have the might to do. Our na- 
ture is revealed in its developement, and this 
developement shows the will of its creator, as 
the design of the former is hid in the nature of 
the thing formed. We live God's will, in liv- 
ing after our nature. Could we fancy the 
acorn endowed with consciousness, when it 
first springs from the ground a tiny stem and 
leaf, it might say, "What I am to be I know 
not, all is dark before me ;" but, urged on by ir. 
resistible impulse, it continues to throw forth 
shoots, leaves and branches, and learns its des- 
tiny to become the oak in the fact of becom- 
ing it. So what God wills us to be and do, is 
revealed in that which we continually tend to 
do, with our whole nature, as the acorn tends 
to the oak, the seed the flower, the child the 
man ; and the more wholly and genuinely we 
13 -^ 



154 STUDIES IN RELI&ION. 

live, so the more perfectly do we learn hii^ 
thought and fulfil his will. But instead of 
seeing what God will make out of us, we seek 
to make something out of ourselves, and so 
only spoil his work by oni foolish intermed- 
dling. Yes, we talk of forming character, 
and lay out in our thought, plans of what we 
will be like, as if the Great Artist of all would 
permit us to mar the smallest detail yi his crea- 
tion by our caricature sketching. We are not 
willing to be ourselves, — what God meant us 
to be. Like some perverse oakling, instead 
of following the tendencies to leaf, to bud, to 
stem, we insist on running altogether to stem, 
and so the obstructed leaves and buds wither 
into knots and gnarls, and the tree is thereby 
unsightly. Oh ! it were much if we were to 
give ourselves up meekly to the sway of our 
being, to follow the leadings of God in our 
tastes and talents and convictions, to be willing 
to be ourselves and none other ! Do not mis- 
call this pride or boldness or arrogance ; it is 
very bold, very arrogant, to rank oneself in 
conformity with others ; to take shelter under 
their established and approved life and opin- 
ions; it is insisting that we know our right 
place better than God does ; but there is no 



DUTY. 155 

spirit so meek and humble, there is no resig- 
nation so touchingly profound, as that of doing 
one's own work in one's own appointed way. 
It is the abandonment of self, the surrendering 
to the influence, that pervades all nature : nor 
does it fail of its reward ; it is the casting off 
of responsibility, of anxiety, of the wear of 
providing for our spiritual needs, and the living 
forever at God's care and expense: it is the 
highest application of Jesus' words, "Why 
take ye thought for the morrow ?" The genius 
always recognises that he is not his own, but 
another's : the prophets do not speak their own 
words, — but that which is given them to say, 
that they say. Jesus expressly exculpates 
himself, " It is not I, but the Father." All 
nature says, I do as I am bid ; I accomplish 
that whereunto I am sent. 

This naturalness is the greatest, nay, it is 
the one virtue ; it is saying, Father, what wilt 
thou make of me ? I will become plastic to 
thy thought : I will live out all that thou inspir- 
est within me, meekly but fearlessly, serenely 
but steadily. Does this going on one's own 
path seem something icy and awful, like a 
northern mountain pass ? Does the ear ache 
for the shout of companionship, for bird song. 



156 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

or insect trill, so oppressive is the silence ? 
Yet there is no solitude in nature ; from vale 
to peak it teems with life, and the air itself is 
heavy with the wings of unseen visitants : so in 
the world of mind, the needed hour never fails 
of succor and sympathy : a familiar face may 
here and there be missed, but it is on untried 
ways that men have encountered angels. Let 
us follow a thought or emotion on whatever 
circuitous path it lead, and when we come to 
an opening, we shall find that others have been 
there before us, for God is one, and as diverse 
and individual as seem our lives, they are in 
reality currents of one ocean: we continu- 
ally intersect each other, and are bound up- 
ward and onward, with a multitude that no 
man can number. 

To do the highest we know and feel, — not to 
choose what to do, that is our own will, but 
to do our highest, and of all that God has given 
us, impulse, feeling, thought, conviction, capa- 
city, to lose nothing, but to evolve out of it the 
element of immortality it embodies, for we are 
not our own, nor at our own disposal, but re- 
cipients of spirit, and its children, or heroes or 
martyrs, as the case may be. Nor let us be 
deterred from this, by any mistaken notion 



DUTY. 157 

that we are living to ourselves. Ah, how 
much that is done with no thought of duty, — 
done, it may be, with a self-condemning feeling 
that it is against duty, — how many such deed 
has been blessed of God to infinite ends ! Some- 
times, when the heart has been tired of the 
signs of premeditated purpose, the din and wear 
of doing duty, by storm, when the useful, the 
important things in life have seemed somewhat 
wearisome, and one has bethought him with a 
sigh of those far-away lilies, who won their 
regal garments without toiling or spinning, — - 
then have we come, as it seemed by chance, 
upon a word uttered by some lowly spirit, in 
its weakness or triumph, uttered merely for the 
relief of the utterance, or have heard a trait 
of character mentioned perhaps in condemna- 
tion, but betraying, that there a human soul 
was struggling, possibly sinking, and such word 
or characteristic has stirred the fountain of 
being, to its depths, — has made resolve strong- 
er, life clearer, or patience more profound ; 
and supposing these had thus appealed, but 
to one heart, to one immortal being, swayed 
by tenderness and thought, who can measure 
the good of that word or character, a word 
13* 



158 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

spoken to the winds, a character evolved by 
sufFermg, perhaps stricken with error ? 

Let us distrust ourselves and be very hum- 
ble, when we imagine ourselves doing good : 
it is as infants, putting their tiny hands to 
their mother's work, fancying themselves as- 
sistants, — knowing not that to lie down in 
quietness beside, or to continue afar off, their 
sports were to help her the most. Who are 
the useful, who the important ones of society ? 
Let us keep ourselves from the folly of judg- 
ing. 

This view of the subject relieves us from 
all care. Our work is appointed, we have 
only to do it. But our activity may seek wrong 
directions, injurious perhaps to the society of 
which we are members ? I do not know any 
rule, by which we can be taught to judge of 
consequences, nor does it seem to me, that any 
eye, save that of the unsleeping one, can be 
keen-sighted enough to look from the begin- 
ning to the end. Has not science been mobbed 
for its inventions, and was not that grey monk, 
the first mixer of gunpowder, an useful man, 
since his act has, as we are told, decreased the 
frequency, and lessened the brutality of wars ? 
God guides the world. God holds the pen of 



DUTY. 159 

the scoffer against Christianity, and Christen- 
dom hastes to put that away from itself, which 
can be scoffed at. The scoffer did his work : 
in what spirit, it beseems him best to know, 
but that work has saved myriads from scoffing. 
We must do our work, that which God reveals 
to us, through talent and opportunity, — do it, 
not with eye-service, as men-pleasers, but with 
pure heart as unto him, and thus doing our 
own. 

" We do His work, yet know it not !'* 



SYMPATHY. 

I BEAR the lot of all that live. 

This universe of men ; — 

With hardy helpers, toil and strive, 

With weary wights complain ; 

In plan and plot and task combine, 

I, that am so small and weak, — 

Smile in their smiles and weep their tearSy 

And lang:uish with their hopes and fears :^ 

And for their cowardice and crime, 

The red blood dyes my cheek. 



160 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

I iisten to the cruel doom, 
Done on the helpless and the old, 
The arrowed story finds its home, 
Within my being's i^amost fold ; 
I seem to grapple with a chain, 
I utter burning words in vain, — 
Th-eir iron enters in my soul. 

And when the beautiful and free, 
The favored sons of faith and joy, 
Betray their high fidelity, 
For some earth-passion's base decoy j 
I shrink before the conscience-eye, 
I know, is glaring through their own ; 
I shiver, as there waileth by 
The grieving spirit's under-tone : 
Their heights, perchance, I never knew, 
But in their depths I struggle too. 

I do not see that others bear, 
This Atlas-burden, weighing down ; 
I will not think, I will not care, 
For sin*or sorrow, save my own : 
The wind is passing o'er the tree, 
And every leaf and leaflet moves. 
Its course disturbs the sleeping sea, 
It starteth into thousand curves, 
It breaketh into myriad ripples. 
And every wave and wavelet free, 
Shares in the troubled ocean-circles. 

I know not of humanity. 
What its unwritten tale may be, 
But as it sways to deed or word, 



SYMPATHY. 161 



A conscious mystery is stirred ; 
I cannot shun the coming tide, — 
I cannot from the wind-god hide ; 
I am too weak to think or strive, 
Yet bear the lot of all that live. 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 

Life is the thoughts, emotions, acts of a living, 
being : we cannot separate life from the idea 
of somewhat that lives, neither can we have 
the idea of being without life. Our life is not 
ourself, for we speak of it as belonging to us : 
we say our life, our past and coming life, as 
we say our head, our hand : there is a power 
that lives the life. Life is the manifestation 
of this power in thought, feeling, deed, word. 
This manifestation of power in man we call 
human life. Whence this human life ? It is 
from this power, this invisible spirit in man. 
Whence this spirit ? We can only refer it to 
that which has no whence, that we call primary 
spirit, original, God. " The word was with 



162 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

Ood, was God ; but the word has taken flesh, 
and become man.'^ 

Life, then, is only the mode in which invi- 
sible spirit shows itself. My life is the mak- 
ing visible of the invisible power, I. I, too, 
am derived, but from somewhat underived. 
My life stands in me same relation to me, that 
I do to God. 

If life is the making visible of the invisible, 
there can be nothing in life which is not first in 
the soul. But life does not exhaust the soul, 
though I suppose all that is in the soul is put 
forth in some way in life. 

Then, it seems, that life is not the great re- 
ality ; but I, that live the life, am the great re- 
ality : life is subordinate to me : not joy and 
sorrow, not hope and fear, are so interest- 
ing, but the joyer, the sorrower, the hoper, the 
fearer, is interesting : what I feel and do is of 
consequence, because I am of consequence : 
could you separate it from me, it were nothing : 
the smile and frown of the prince is no more 
than any other smile and frown, but, because 
it is the prince that smiles and frowns, does it 
confer favor or bring disgrace : one act or 
word is no more than another, only as it is my 
act and word, does it take moral character: 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE, 163^ 

all the virtue, all the vice, of life depends 
on the moral station of the liver, on the rank 
which the invisihle spirit holds in the universe 
of things : so, the question is not. What is 
the end and aim of life ; but, What is the des- 
tiny of the liver ? — because, on this destiny, as 
an invisible spirit, depends the whole character 
of life. If I am mortal, opposite to God, then 
is the true aim of my life to live to the mortal, 
to the sensuous, to do evil. As then the entire 
aspect of life depends on the nature of the 
liver, our question is. What is the origin and 
destiny of me, the invisible power behind my 
life, and from which alone it takes character 
and object ? 

We are brought to this mystic question : 
Whence the soul ? Whence this acting ener- 
gy I call myself? My question of whence 
shows that I am derived. I am a child : the 
human soul is an orphan of unknown parent- 
age : it says continually. Who is my father ? 
Whence am I ? The soul answers its own 
questions : man has always referred his ori- 
gin to the gods ; that is, to a power above and 
beyond himself: Jupiter is the father of gods 
and men : the Great Spirit is the father of 
the red man : God, says the Hebrew Scrip- 



164 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

tures, made man in His own image. This is 
the testimony of the human soul to its origin. 
So much did the Father tell his child. He did 
not leave him utterly in the dark, but put with- 
in him a glimpse of his paternity. This testi- 
mony remains without contradiction : there 
have been vastly different theories of how God 
made man; in what way spirit was put in 
body : bnt the assertion, that he did make 
marn, and not man make himself, is, I believe, 
universal. 

The Geniuses of the race, the pre-eminently 
inspired ones, not only testify that God made 
man, but that He made him in his own image. 
As the soul becomes more intensely conscious 
of itself, these hints about its paternity con- 
tinually increase. Moses says, God made 
man like unto Himself: Jesus says, I am the 
son of God : that was his answer to the soul's 
question, Whence am I ? And the human soul 
always feels, in its deepest moments, that it 
comes from God, that its source is the infinite, 
the good, is one with that of all nature ; that 
there is one source of all, one God ; and man 
and nature are his offspring. In this sublime 
theism is the origin of the soul revealed to it : 
it is made by God : the likeness of God, the 



DOCTRmE OF LIFE. 165 

son of God, no longer an orphan, it has found 
a Father. 

If man's origin has been revealed to him, 
has his destiny been so also ? If I know the 
beo^innino^, do I know also the end ? If I know 
whence I come, do I know whither I am to go ? 

Destiny is that which we are fated or in- 
tended to do, or become, by a power and will 
above or prior to our own. Men always be- 
lieve in destiny. It is the thought that makes 
the grandeur and pathos of the old tragedies. 
As man is himself not the God, but the created 
of God, so is that which he is to do and be- 
come the created of God. He is a destined 
being. What makes the melancholy grandeur 
of those old poets, enters also deeply into the 
tragedy of Jesus' life. I have a destiny to ac- 
complish, he says, and how am I urged forward, 
till it is done ! Everywhere, he evidently 
feels that he cannot escape his fate. Arise, he 
says ; let us go forth to meet it ! Even in his 
severest hour this thought is present. If it be 
possible^ he prays. He feels that the impossi- 
ble cannot be abrogated : being such as he is, 
he must die. 

The conviction of destiny is a truth of the 
14 



166 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

soul, seen dimly. Man feels the pressure of a 
power, but cannot explain it. 

If our definition of life be correct, that it is 
only the putting forth of the living being, and has 
no character, only as it takes it from that, then 
my destiny, or that which I am destined to do, 
depends upon my nature. I must necessarily 
do what I am. If I am a stone, I must do a 
stone's life ; if a flame, must put forth light 
and heat. I cannot do otherwise than what I 
am. I can only put that from me which is in 
me. A lump of ice cannot ignite, because it 
is not in its nature so to do. It is not action, 
that is primarily destined, but nature, that is 
destined. Being what I am, I must do as I 
am. Destiny lies farther back than life: it 
is in the soul itself: its nature is destined: 
and as this nature is defined in its origin as 
son of God, its destiny flows from its origin. 
My nature is destined ; it is not my choice : 
I v/illed not to come into being as son of God : 
I was sent : in my origin is the solution of my 
destiny : as I am the child of God, or of the 
good, the infinite, so am I destined to do thp 
good, the eternal : it is my nature so to do, 
laid upon me by an irresistible fiat: it is 
natural ; I am born to it. 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 167 

As our nature is thus divine, in living natu- 
rally, we live divinely : if we live after our 
nature, we live to God. Now, here comes the 
wonderful contest between destiny and the hu- 
man will. Man says, '^ I will not live after 
the nature that is given me : I will set up for 
myself; I will be God myself, and oppose 
God the Father. I will set up a kingdom that 
shall be adverse to His.'^ Thence follow trans- 
gressions of nature, of the law of nature, as 
we say, sensualism, hypocrisy, selfishness, pre- 
tence : man's nature is outraged and mocked. 
And this is opposition to God : it is the coro- 
nation of Satan. 

It is remarkable that the poems and fables 
that seem to cling most tenaciously to the me- 
mory of the race, are true to this revelation of 
the soul. Always the cause of evil, the pre- 
cursor of individual and national ruin, is pride, 
or the soul's assumption of sovereignty to it- 
self, in opposition to the sovereignty of God. 
In the mythological story of Adam in Para- 
dise, Eve is tempted to eat of the tree, by the 
promise, that they shall be ^^ as the gods," 
and Lucifer, son of the morning, falls from 
Heaven, through a like glorious ambition. The 
instinct which has pursued pride, as unholy, 



168 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

has a deep foundation in truth. Christianity, 
which is the religion that expresses the recon- 
ciliation of the soul with God, the solution of 
the problem of the soul's origin and destiny, 
is emphatically the religion of humility, and 
Jesus of Nazareth, whose life was the highest 
expression of this fact of reconciliation, is al- 
ways represented as ^* filled with humility.'* 
Indeed, this virtue in him has been so exclu- 
sively dwelt upon, that the world has seemed 
well nigh to have forgot in it his manliness and 
energy, but the exaggeration shows there 
was a truth to be exaggerated ; and, notwith- 
standing the loftiness of Jesus' claims, more 
unequivocally expressed by him than by any 
other, there is a vein of humility running 
through them which takes from them all arro- 
gance : " I can of mine own self do nothing." 
Pride is the exaltation of the finite. Hu- 
mility is the renunciation of the finite to the 
sovereignty of the infinite. Any exaltation of 
the finite must be followed by loss, because 
the finite subsists through the infinite, and can- 
not be, independently of it : it is the shadow 
assuming to be somewhat, and arraying itself 
against the substance : the instant it sepa- 
rates itself from the substance, it ceases to be. 



DOCTRINE OP LIFE. 169 

The assumption of independence, of prioriness, 
by that which is dependent and derived, in the 
nature of things, leads to overthrow, for that 
which is derived cannot exist of itself. The 
separation of the finite man from his infinite 
source, is that fact in the soul which always 
precedes a fall in the soul : it must be so neces- 
sarily: the earth is radiant with its myriad 
colors, it seems itself to sparkle and glow, 
shall it say to the sun, I am giver and dispen- 
ser of light ; I have no need of thee ? let the 
sun withdraw, how soon would it sit forlorn 
in its darkness ! Now, the soul of man is 
not original, but derived : the splendor of his 
genius is but the flash of a central fire, that 
shines through him ; the highest reach of his 
thought but the action of a force whose origin 
is hid in infinity. Wit, intellect, virtue, what 
are they, but the radiance of an unseen sun ? 
Every thing that appears in man suggests a 
higher, that does not appear. And where is 
this higher ? We cannot trace it, cannot fa- 
thom it. The soul is the door that opens into 
the infinite : through this door rushes the un- 
fathomable tide of things ; but into the ocean 
behind we cannot go. We know only of that 
which descends into us. Beauty, genius, vir- 
14* 



170 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

tue, flow into us from the infinite : the soul 
is not the origin, but the reception : it is not 
the father ; it is the son : and the son knoweth 
only that which the father tells him. Now, 
this is the humility of true religion : it is the 
attitude of reception. Christianity being the 
announcement of the filial relation of man 
to God, or the sonship of the human soul, 
and reconciliation in that sonship, necessarily 
inculcates this virtue, as the natural posture 
of the receiver to the giver. Now, the reverse 
of this, the separation of the soul from God, 
the setting up of its own sovereignty, is a fact 
in its history ; and whenever it thus says, " I 
will ascend above the stars ; I will be like to 
the Most High," already the prophecy of its 
ruin has gone forth: this is the one sin, the 
parent of all others : and this takes place 
whenever we lose sight of the fact of the eter- 
nal inspiration of the soul, that it is the child, 
the son, the receiver ; that genius and power, 
intellect and virtue, are gifts out of the free 
treasure-house of God ; that man receives, 
that God gives, not some things, but all things, — 
not at times, but always, — not life, but each liv- 
ing moment, — not intellect,but the daily thought, 
— not love, but each movement of sympathy. 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 171 

This continual dependence on, or constant in- 
spiration of, the soul by God, is the one truth, 
which, the more or less clearly seen, has caused 
the protest against pride, which is the more or 
less conscious denial of this inspiration. 
Christianity being the highest expression of 
this fact, has no place in it for pride : it is en- 
tire self-renunciation, the yielding to the spirit, 
to be driven of it whithersoever it will, and 
this idea of renunciation has been always in- 
terwoven with Christianity : all its ancient 
orders and institutions were based upon it. 
Let it be, that these organizations have passed, 
or are passing away : the great inward fact, 
that they, embodied, must continually reappear, 
and impress the imagination and heart, through 
new symbols. Now, as ever, must the soul 
take the vows of renunciation, or it can never 
become the " bride of Christ :" it must learn 
that it is of itself nothing ; that it has what it 
receives ; that it exists not for its own glory, 
but for that of the infinite, whose alone it is ; 
that its capabilities are continual gifts, through 
which it puts forth the power of the unseen and 
divine ; that not its own will is to be done, nor 
its own glory to be made manifest, but the will 
and glory of the eternal light that rays through 



172 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

it, and of which its brightness is the reflec* 
tion. This is entire self-renunciation, the sac- 
rifice of the finite ; the giving one's self away ; 
the fact and meaning of humility. But see 
what comes through it, and only through it, 
the soul, in yielding itself to the infinite, be- 
comes the medium of the infinite, in ceasing 
to be a rebel, it knows itself the son, the 
brightness of the Father's glory, and express 
image of his personality. Apart from God^ 
in its momentary pride, it withers like a gourd 
in one night, because the influxes of thought 
and love ceasing, the soul perishes, but do- 
ing nothing of its own self, that is, in and 
for the finite, but doing after the eternal in^ 
spirations, it does divine works, miracles to 
those who know not whence its power comes * 
The proud are weak, because they seek 
strength in that which is of itself a shadow : 
the humble are mighty, because into them 
flows the might of infinity; and renouncing 
possessions of their own, they have open ac- 
cess to the illimitable wealth of God. 

In wrong-doing, we fight with our destiny 
as sons of God ; and no one can do this with 
impunity. The old fables teach us that no 
man can resist his fate. What is written, is 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 173 

written. The terrible peril of resisting one's 
destiny is dimly shadowed through all the 
poetry of the world : its burden is the tragedy 
of poetry : it is the tragedy of life. It is 
but another tone of the same wail in which the 
spiritualist laments the soul's exile from God, 
the same thought under different forms. The 
soul, in choosing evil, resists its nature, spurns 
its fate, and dismay and suffering inevitably 
follow. We must go, as we are sent: we 
choose our way at the cost of harmony, beauty, 
peace, because our true way is the way of na- 
ture, and all evil is unnatural, is discord and 
deformity. 

The soul is son to the infinite, and lord over 
the finite : its true life is the putting forth of 
power, thought, will, in the direction of the 
right. This is to live naturally, to fulfil des- 
tiny, and this harmony of action to nature is 
heaven : so to arrive at heaven is the aim of 
the soul, but not a heaven above or at the end 
of life, but through and in it. 

Each of us, then, being the child of God, 
made in His image, and so immortal and sove- 
reign to the finite, must live as long as we put 
forth thought and will, and as we are above the 
life of every day, so are we superior to human 



174 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

life, so called, but wherever man lives, he must 
live a human life : in surviving our present or- 
ganization we do not survive human life, but only 
a mode of it. We must still put forth invisible 
power, in finite form, as now ; with the change 
of the present^body, we have not done our work, 
have not accomplished our destiny, which is to 
be victor over the outward, over sin and sorrow 
and circumstance : the sovereignty of the spirit 
over the senses, the establishment of the son. 
When does this take place 1 To some sooner, 
to some later, to some under one form and en- 
vironment, to others under another. The 
vanished from the earth — are they not going 
on, fulfilling their destiny, through more or 
less joy and sorrow ? But when this destiny is 
accomplished, that is, when the soul has be- 
come sovereign over the outward, and all tran- 
sient things are put under its feet, then what 
does it do ? It lives in perfect union with 
God, confidant of his councils, and sharer of 
his power. Is not this dimly shadowed forth 
by all religions, and do not the Apostles ex- 
press it in their picture of the Son's sitting on 
the right hand of the throne of the Father ? 
The soul must reign till it has subjected all 
to itself, excepting Him only from whom it 



DOCTRINE OF LIFE. 175 

proceeds, for the Son himself must still be sub- 
jecl unto him, that God may be all in all. 



VIRTUE. 

That only is virtue which is in accordance to 
the nature of the soul : that which cannot be 
proved so to be, is not virtue, but the reverse. 
Humility is a virtue, because it is the attitude 
of reception, and this is the soul's natural pos- 
ture. If we accept the fact, that the soul is son 
of the Father, heir of all things, it follows that 
all save the father must be subject to it. God 
has given it a name above every name, and 
therefore all the outward must be held in sub- 
jection to this inward life that flows upon us 
from Him. All that we possess, we possess as 
sons of God : thought, love, power, ability of 
any kind, are not of our earning, not won by 
labor, nor bought at a price, but the free gift 
of the Father : so all our rights are birth-rights : 
all rights are divine rights : all that the soul 



176 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

claims for power to be and do as the son of 
God, is its right : this includes freedom of 
thought and action, but we are not free to act 
viciously, because such mode of action is not 
a divine right, not in accordance with the 
soul's nature, which is to be sovereign over all 
things, the likeness of the Father, and vice is 
its servitude to the senses. 

Obedience to physical laws is legitimated 
from the nature of the soul. Any mode of life 
that tends to diminish the sovereignty of the 
mind and heart is an encroachment on the 
kingdom of the son : for this reason, intempe- 
rance in eating and drinking is a vice, not that 
it brings suffering, but that it impairs or de- 
stroys the energy of thought and will, and so 
displaces the son from his throne. Appetite is 
one of the modes by which the spirit appropri- 
ates to itself the outward world : eating and 
drinking have their ideal : the spirit builds up 
its human form from the wide domain of na- 
ture : the elements of all things are the same : 
forms are perpetually changing : man appro- 
priates the elements of other forms to build up 
his own. 

** That which to-day is a pine, 
Yesterday was a bundle of grass." 



VIRTUE. 177 

*' As the bee through the garden ranges, 
From world to world the godhead changes." 

The instinct by which man is driven to such 
appropriation, is hunger : without this the spi- 
rit would not form to itself a mortal body. 
We see that even this, that we are accustomed 
to call one of the lower instincts, is in its range 
divine, the action of spirit, — but overstepping 

its boundary, when the finite embodiment 
usurps its place over the spirit to be embodied, 
when the intellect is dulled and affections bru- 
tified, then is it soul-abdication, the leaving of 
the son his father's house and wasting himself 
in riotous living. All life is divine : every 
form of it is the embodiment of an ideal : it is 
only when the form becomes sovereign to the 
thought, that the soul is outcast and life sen- 
sualism. Sensuality is the forgetfulness of 
existence in the modes of existence ; when 
the latter transgress the boundary im- 
posed by the presence of spirit, do they 
become sin, and the tendency is to the 
entire repulsion of spirit out of that mode of 
existence, when " sin is full ripe, it brings 
forth death" — always destruction to the form 
of life, that outrages the laws of spirit. Now 
15 



178 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

all forgetfulness of reality, in the forms of re- 
ality, is sensualism, however beautiful and re- 
fined those forms may be : they are no less 
shows of the real, and the soul that loses sight 
of itself in the shows, loses that which is to it 
unity and life. There seems to be a contin- 
ual tendency to this spiritual oblivion. I sup- 
pose spirit is intensely conscious to itself: it 
says, I am ; in taking finite form, it descends : 
" birth is a sleep and a forgetting :" there is a 
certain losing of itself in the finite, and what is 
religion but the reviving to the spirit's life, its 
awakening to consciousness, or the remember- 
ing of God ? The phenomena of the soul, as- 
piration, conscience, remorse, are they not 
efforts to return to this consciousness, gleams 
of wakefulness, rays of primal light, darting 
across the soul's night ? We are conscious of 
the individual, of that which separates you 
from me and I from you, but not of that which 
underlies all individuality, and forms our mys- 
terious bond of union: the central ocean of 
Being of which we are the diverse rills, whose 
life, descending into us, is the inspiration by 
which we live, and whose mode of descent is 
the law of our individual life. A person may 
have intellectual acuteness and cultivated 



VIRTUE. 179 

taste, and not be spiritually clear-sighted : he 
may dwell amid the highest forms of spirit, 
aye, in the very regions of art, amid forms 
that seem divine and worthiest to grace the 
portal to the mansion of the unseen, yet they 
are still but the outworks — in the innermost 
temple is no form, only broods the Holy of 
Holies ; and to such, although he has caught 
upon his brow the light, 

" Through the half-open portal glowing," 

the language of the spiritualist, the spirit-seer, 
shall often seem strange and unmeaning. The 
religious sentiment, which is the tendency to 
worship, the instinct of man to bow before some- 
what that is not himself, but greater and higher, 
leads directly to the recognition of the divine, 
for that which is in man and yet above him, in 
forms and yet sovereign to forms, is absolute 
existence, or the presence of God : so that this 
sentiment is the direct pathway into spirit-con- 
sciousness; and a mind may range through 
all the forms of being, from the lower to the 
higher, and stand at last, as did Newton, after 
traversing the sublime circuit of the celestial 
worlds, at the very gate of the temple of the 
Most High, and a peasant, a negro-slave, who 



180 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

knows not star or sun, shall, through religious 
culture alone, mount at once into the same re- 
gion and tell the sage more than he yet knows. 
The study of noble and beautiful forms is in- 
deed a natural induction to the knowledge of 
that which is in itself nobleness and beauty ; 
but piety has a royal road to these things : it is 
winged at shoulders and feet, and often soars 
over the wall of sense, while others seek to 
make an opening through it. 

In the soul, as recipient of God, is lodged 
thought, will, power to do or to forbear, and in 
its sovereignty over the senses, thought is clari- 
fied, love deepened, and the power to do, so 
increased, that its acts seem miracles to the 
sensualist. We do not feel within ourselves 
the power of doing what the spiritualist does. 
No wonder : through the predominance of sen- 
sual life, the vigor of thought and will is im- 
paired, the power to do or forbear affected. Pas- 
sion of any kind tends to destroy the integrity of 
thought. Love and hate are natural instincts, 
through which the soul seeks or avoids union 
with itself: the one, being to union, the other 
to separation. As love is divine, so are there 
divine hates : hate of evil, of sin, death, for the 
nature of the soul is life, is good, and it hates 



VIRTUE* 181 

that which is adverse to itself: but when loVe, 
instead of being the mode, in which the soul 
seeks union, with that, which is good unto it, 
and hate the avoidance of that which is to it 
evil, assume themselves sovereignty, then do 
they become passions, and destroy the free and 
harmonious action of the mind and heart. 

Whilst we love the good, the fair, the true, 
our love is divine, because the soul is goodness, 
truth, beauty, but when we love the false, the 
evil, and call them good and fair, then is our 
love unnatural and wrong : the angel seeks 
alliance with the reptile. It is terrible to love 
what we should hate, and we do this oftener 
perhaps, than we think. We love hoUowness 
and error, when they are tinged with grace or 
glitter of any kind : we cherish selfishness* 
because it opens to us a path to pre-eminence : 
we make a covenant with falsehood, because it 
brings to us favor : we take the serpent to our 
bosom, because of the beauty of his stripes : 
it is the soul, given over to unlawful passion, 
the abdication of its nature, and thus exiled, do 
we expect to know the power or exercise the 
authority of the sonship ? Intellect and heart, 
the whole being suffers when love is impure, 
that is, when the soul loves aught of a different 
15* 



182 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

nature from itself. It must preserve its unity 
at the cost of all things. 

Christianity, we are told, is a religion of love. 
It is so, because it is a religion of unity : in 
oneness of nature is man reconciled to God, 
in oneness of nature is he bound to man ; in 
the revelation of the son, is announced that of 
the brother. If we are the son of God, then is 
our fellow also a son ; we love him, because 
he is of our own lineage ; he is bound to us, by 
that mystic tie of kindred, which is one of the 
strongest instincts of humanity ; but his frivol- 
ity and falsity, our soul is bound to hate, as it 
hates our own evil ; the more we feel, that he 
is our brother and the son of God, the more 
we pity him, that he has fallen from his high 
estate ; we cannot scorn him indeed, for though 
fallen, he is still peer of the realm ; but if we 
love him for his weakness or vice, or that he, 
in any way, minister to our selfishness and folly, 
then do we descend low as he ; *^ love makes all 
things equal.'' When we seek the society of 
others, not because they are the recipients of 
the good, the true, the inspired of God, but that 
their companionship serve our vanity or selfish- 
ness or ambition, we turn the degradation of 
-our brother to our own profit ; we make them 



VIRTUE. 183 

worse, and ourselves worse. They, who love us 
for our faults, degrade us ; they do not indeed 
iove us, for we are greater than our faults ; 
they love that which we are continually putting 
off, the excrescence of our being ; such love 
contaminates. When we wish to be loved, for 
aught less than the highest within us, we are 
already fallen, and would draw another to our 
fall. As there is a perversion of love, so 
is there of hate ; hate is the protest of the soul, 
against what is evil to it ; it is divine ; God 
hates sin, light has no fellowship with darkness, 
life is the enemy of death ; there is a reality, 
which gives to the words love and hate, friend 
and foe, significance ; the imaginative John 
describes the rider on the white horse, as in 
*^ righteousness, making war." The soul pro- 
tests against evil in every form, as being ad- 
verse to its nature ; in hate, it makes war upon 
it and would destroy it ; hate is the instinct of 
destruction ; but when we hate not the evil, but 
the evil-doer, then do we hate not an alien, but 
our brother, and this makes the hater a mur- 
derer, for murder is the unlawful infliction of 
death, and to hate that which the soul should 
not, is murder. But the soul must never yield 
to evil, it must annihilate it : how is this done ? 



184 STUDIES IN RELIGIOr?. 

The soul protests against evil : but protest- 
ation is not victory ; pain, sin, disappointment 
exist ; resignation to them is abdication of spirit- 
sovereignty, the giving up of its life. Life is 
not submission, but a battle : it is a war of the 
angels. Nations have worked themselves up 
to success and glory, sword in hand ; it is the 
grossest way of combating evil, but it is a great 
fact, and means somewhat. We read of be- 
sieged cities, in which the last desperate act of 
the inhabitants was to fire their own city and 
perish in its flames. Do these facts mean no- 
thing ? or are they not rather a fierce stammer- 
ing of the truth, of humanity's eternal resist- 
ance to wrong, — a repetition of the lesson given 
in our daily experience, that the soul must 
never succumb, but perish, if that were possi- 
ble, rather than yield to the foe. But this 
fighting with evil, opposing force to force, 
meeting difficulty with complaint, injury with 
injury, has failed from the creation to this day. 
It belongs to our low, spiritual civilization : it 
is of the same character in individual life as 
the resort to sword and fire in the life of na- 
tions. Evil still exists. There was more of 
truth than superstition in the old belief, that 
the spirits of darkness cannot be foiled by 



YIRTTJE. 185 

mortal weapons, but only to be put to flight by 
the sign of the cross. 

Every soul learns, in the study of its own 
mysteries, that the only mode of overcoming 
evil, is to accept it. Accept all evil, says Je- 
sus, do not put it away : take it. We do not 
see the deep significance of his words. We 
abhor injustice, indignity, defeat, — why ac- 
cept them ? Because that is the conquest of 
them. In accepting anything, we make it 
our own, it becomes subject to us, and has no 
longer power over us. The traveller comes 
to the m®untain-pass, and finds the storm has 
been there before him, uprooting trees, and 
filling his path with tangled boughs : he cannot 
pursue his accustomed way, into the valley 
and so up the opposite mount, but he accepts 
the work of the tempest, and passes over on 
the intercepting boughs as a bridge, from one 
height to the other. All evil is obstruction : 
when it ceases to be this, and becomes a 
furtherance, it ceases to be evil : any defeat 
which is made a means of progress, is and 
must be success. Is pain an evil ? yet large 
spirits have made it the platform for the devel- 
opement of the greatest virtues : the hero 
makes hardship the groundwork of endurance : 



186 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the scholar finds toil the condition of intellec- 
tual strength : the soul denies the possibility 
of evil, by transforming it into good : as e vil, 
it wars upon it, — as good, it loves it. Is disap- 
pointment an evil ? then must the soul not be 
resigned to it, and such resignation is always 
sad, and that alone were enough to prove it an 
error, for no view of life can be a right one, 
which is not a joyous one. There is, indeed, a 
gaiety of superficiality, the play of sunbeams 
on the surface of a lake, whose dark depth 
heeds them not : there is also the brightness 
of the stars, that burn by their primal fires : 
there is the mirth of the insect, that sees only 
the spangle of the flower, on which it perches ; 
there is also the gladness of the creative heart, 
that puts forth that revelry of bird and bee. 
The soul that dwells in truth, dwells in the 
centre of primal radiance, which is but the 
woven garment of joy. Disappointment is not 
to be hidden or consoled : it is to be made im- 
possible : and this is done, in the perception of 
the truth, that evil is only obstruction to the 
soul's true action : when the soul uses, pain, 
wrong, defeat, as means of developement, it 
destroys their enmity and makes them to serve 
its bidding as a serf does his lord. 



VIRTUE. 187 

" If any man compel thee to go a mile, go 
with him twain/' said Jesus. If to-day or to- 
morrow aught obstruct usj in our true life, distur- 
bances and annoyances from our own or other's 
imperfections, we cannot put it out of sight : 
to drown its memory in excitement or occupa- 
tion, is oblivion, and not victory. If demand 
is made on our strength, or our weakness, 
our patience or help, it is no use to turn 
away from it: the evil that is avoided to- 
day, will come in some other form to-morrow, 
and so continually, till it be overcome. We 
had better meet every evil, face to face, go 
with it the whole length, be it one mile or 
twain, and prove ourself its master, by making 
it the incoming of mental and spiritual power. 
The only evil any person or circumstance can 
do to us, is to make us hate that which we 
should love. If the injurer cause us to hate 
him, then does he injure us vitally; but if 
in his injury we hate him not, but accepting it, 
make it a stepping-stone to higher faith and 
purity, then have we overcome it and him. If 
we scorn another, and he receive our scorn as 
nutriment to higher serenity and reliance, then 
is it the ladder by which he mounts above our 
heads. We do not always see this, for our 



iS8 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

eyes are thick with the dust of time, but the 
brother whom we may scorn, and who turns 
our evil into his good, we shall scarcely dare 
iso to do, when he is revealed in the might of 
his moral power, and all the angels of holiness 
with him. Injuries are not forgiven only in 
their ceasing to be such ; and then^ what is 
there to forgive ? How appropriate the peti- 
tion. Father, do thou forgive them. The soul, 
in transforming its foes into allies, has nothing 
left to hate : it learns that ^' all things are 
vain but love." Prometheus indeed curses his 
oppressor, but it was " ere misery made him 
wise." 

The soul is manifested in mortal body, sur- 
rounded by transient circumstances. It i» 
son of God, it is also son of man. Those 
old fables of an immortal father and mortal 
mother, have deep meaning. The soul is son to 
the infinite, but the finite is its beautiful mother, 
and that which is born of the mortal must die. 
Pain and wrong harm us in our finite manifes- 
tations, but as sons of God, they touch us not : 
€ven when injury is pursued to the extreme of 
death; the son of God cannot die; unscathed 
is the soul from the ills of time. 



VIRTUE. 189 

Do humility and dignity, love and forgive- 
ness, serenity and hope, belong to the soul, by 
right of its nature, then is piety its crown, for 
that is the very looking upward to the Father. 
And how sweet is the presence of this virtue ! 
It can give to the countenance a grace like 
beauty, it opens unknown depths in the eye, 
it developes a peace inexpressible around the 
lines of the lips : it is at home in nature ; it 
knows all things. It is very great, all recog- 
nise it, all, in due time, honor it, all feel that 
it is a vestal, wise in its innocence, holy in its 
simplicity, but it must be a piety in the heart, 
not in the creed, the fulness of trust, the per- 
fectness of love, the entire realization of the 
filial relation. It is when God is no longer the 
judge, the sovereign, but the Father : and that 
one word explains and justifies all, touches all 
things with tenderness, so that nature is not so 
beautiful as it is dear : all events are not 
right, but good: the kind, the caring, is the 
one attribute. Such a soul has the key that 
unlocks the universe. What are all doubts, 
misgivings, difficulties, to it ? It dwells in its 
inner world of peace, as a bird in the circling 
immensity of sunlight, but knows not the radi- 
16 



190 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ance its own wings have absorbed. It is very 
mighty, it is one against the world. It feels 
the grasp of love so strong, that it cannot fear. 
Genius is the king of the world, is the master 
of its palaces, as it utters its thought in woe, 
or bitterness, perhaps. Piety nestles in its 
lowly valleys, in its green nook, where no 
pride comes, and echoes to genius' word in hum- 
ble confidence, looks up with a child's meek 
boldness to this shining angel, that stands upon 
its path, and says, It is true, God has made you 
very great, but I cannot bow before you, nor 
fear 5^ou, for He, the greater, dwells continually 
in my lowly house. Yet piety loves genius, as 
a fair sister loves an heroic brother ; it feels 
what genius speaks : it knows what genius 
tells : it has all things as having nothing. 

For the growth of this silvery condition of 
soul there must be entire freedom. A piety 
imposed is abhorrent, is stiff and ungraceful, 
walks in grave-clothes, consorts among the 
tombs. To be genuine, it must be the flower 
of the individual soul : and, as no one can 
tell beforehand of an untried plant, what its 
blossom will be, what hue it will select for its 
own, as the eternal sunbeam passes over it, 
what form it will be like unto, whether the 



VIRTUE. 191 

circling dome, or horned moon, or cavernous 
depths of air, but only that it will be the 
crown and effluence of the plant, so piety, 
to be pure, must be unique : it cannot be 
hastened nor retarded ; cannot be given nor 
taken : it comes in the fulness of its time, 
when the gods of fear and hope, of custom and 
speculation, are passing away, and preceded by 
a choral song of promise, the soul discerns and 
announces the Father. 

Yet not even piety itself constitutes man the 
son of God, but, being the son, then is it, with all 
the shining sister train, his befitting ornament, 
as star and ribband are not themselves rank, 
but the insignia of rank. Virtue belongs to 
the soul, because it is the son : it is the con- 
formity of its action to its nature. But though 
man leaves his father's house, and feed with 
the swine, he is not less the son, and in that 
fact lies his shame and misery. Were he any 
thing less than the offspring of the father, 
were he a hireling, or friend, or pupil, even, 
to lose one's self in the outward, to palsy 
thought and power in the sensual, to seal up 
the heart in worldliness, were not so bad, but 
for the heir of all things to clothe himself in 
the rags of time, for the possessor of divine 



192 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

power to cripple his own energies, that is the 
terrible undoing, — it is the fall of the son. 



RETRIBUTION. 

We find in nature, that nothing is isolated ; 
nothing stands alone, but every thing pro- 
duces somewhat else in endless succession : the 
bud, the leaf, — the flower, the seed, and, again, 
the seed, the plant, and so on continually : day 
comes forth from the bosom of night, and night 
succeeds day, alternately parent and child of 
one another. 

We partake of the life of nature, and belong 
to this universal succession : a thought be- 
comes a word, a word an act, — and, again, an 
act produces a thought, which, in its turn, 
drops the seed of its successor. We are to- 
day, in person, in mind, in heart, the result or 
accumulation of all our preceding days, 
thoughts, feelings. We are the same as when 
infants ; the same, and yet another : not a 
line of the outward form, not a thought nor 



RETRIBUTION. 193 

act of the child, has fallen to the ground, but 
has gone to contribute to the result of to-day. 
The circumstances that surround us at any- 
given time, are transitory, but they are the oc- 
casions of modes of life, thought, and feeling, 
which are not perishing, the mortal mothers of 
immortal children. The immortality of a 
thought, a word, a deed ! We can trace them 
back sometimes to the limits of memory. We 
are what they have made us : our consciousness 
is the epitome of our whole life : we forget 
the details, we feel the result. Suppose a 
plant endowed with consciousness, it is consci- 
ous of itself: it may not remember every ray 
that has warmed, every frost that has wounded 
it, yet each and all have contributed to make 
it j ust what it is, no more, no less, and of that 
whole it is conscious. 

Now, this great fact lies at the foundation of 
our subject : that which has once been, always 
is : nothing is final, but every thing is a ten- 
dency, a creation. Philosophers tell us, that 
they find this in nature, that every thing pro- 
duces somewhat else to infinity. We find the 
same in our own world of thought : let us try 
to stop this, lay the finger on a thought, an 
16* 



194 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

act, and kill it : while we are thinking of 
it, it has already produced its myriads. 

This fact of the eternal reproductiveness in 
nature and the soul, appears accountable in 
this way only, that all nature partakes of the 
life of God, who is essentially creative, — the 
Creator. Every circlet of water has a motion 
of its own, and yet each partakes of the mo- 
tion of the whole ocean, as it circulates around 
the globe : every drop of water obeys the 
same laws as does the whole ocean : so does it 
seem that all life, in nature, and the soul, par- 
takes of the life of God : every thing that 
lives, a principle, a thought, an act, repeats, 
each in its circle, the laws of that infinite life 
in which we float, and that we call the life of 
God : every thought, every act, must repeat 
the essential attributes of God, as every drop 
in the ocean repeats, in itself, the laws that gov- 
ern the whole ocean. Now, the essential idea 
of God is creation : we cannot conceive of 
him apart from creation : we know him 
through what he does, what he creates : con- 
ceive of him, in what he does or creates. He is 
Creator, the Creator, the Beginner, the Author, 
the Original, the Father : in all these the essen- 
tial idea conveyed is Creator. There is Crea- 



RETRIBUTION. 195 

tor and Creation : that is all we know. All 
we know, all we conceive of, is creation : him 
that we do not know, that we do not compre- 
hend, him we call creator. 

As God is essentially creator, all that lives 
in him is creative. To all nature went the 
law forth, " let each bring forth fruit after 
its kind :'^ all life is creation, because it par- 
takes of the life of God, who is the creator. 

Now, we partake of this creative life, but 
we cannot govern it : we are of the drops 
swept by the tide of the great ocean of being, 
but we cannot rule this tide : we partake of 
a life higher than our own, a life that en- 
velopes our own : we circulate in an ocean 
that surrounds us on every side : it is evident 
that we cannot control its laws, nor evade : we 
are swept onward by that of which we are but 
particles. Every thought, act, word, that goes 
from us, is our own, and is not our own : it 
stands to us in the relation of offspring, but 
it immediately, as it parts from us, partakes of 
the life that envaiopes us, and becomes itself 
creative : it has gone from us, to produce its 
myriads : we cannot stay it, no more than we 
can stay the breath that issues from our lips, 
and diffusing itself, becomes parcel of the sur- 



196 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

rounding atmosphere, or stop the departure of 
the light that we reflect from our person. 

Now, impossible as it is, to abrogate this cre- 
ative life, of which we form a part, we do wish 
and try so to do, and the experience of its im- 
possibility constitutes the great fact of retribu- 
tion. We commit a wrong thought, word, or 
deed : we think it dead ; we will it to be dead ; 
it is not dead : it, too, becomes a creator, and 
its offspring of loss, pain, outward or inward, 
we call retribution : we gave to it life, it 
gives to us somewhat again : it re-tributes. 

In the continual flux and reflux of ocean, 
every drop must come in contact with every 
other : so every thought and act of ours, be- 
coming in its turn creator, sooner or later, in 
the circling tide of being, comes in contact with 
us, and gives us hack again, — retributes just so 
much, measure for measure, as we gave out, 
for this ocean of life, like the liquid by which 
we illustrate it, continually seeks its level : we 
receive as we give, and we give as we receive. 
We apply the word retribution to the offspring 
of evil only, but good is equally retributive : 
every thing produces after its kind, only evil 
is hateful and terrible to the soul, and we dis- 
tinguish its effects by this name. We say too, 



RETRIBUTION. 197 

that retribution comes afterwards : it does so 
in time, but not in reality : the instant an act 
passes from us, it becomes a creator, and re- 
acts in its turn : we are blinded by sensual- 
ism, and call only a certain mode of its action 
retributive; but it is not so: in the birth of a 
thought, a feeling is its retribution : the first 
movement of life in a murderous thought, is to 
stab the soul, that produced it : the first act of 
selfishness and passion is on the soul, from 
whence they issue : then, they spread in wide 
and ever wider circles, till they come back in 
a new form, the same and yet another, and that 
coming back, we call retribution, but the re- 
tribution was as truly made, at the instant of 
going forth. Are not the misery and shame 
of intemperance as truly in the soul, at the 
moment of commission, as when it is repeated 
back to it, in aching brain and bleared eye ? 
Has not selfishness already desolated the heart 
and mind, long before the eager seeker of his 
own convenience finds that he has made his 
life a desert, of which no one envies him the 
full and free possession ? All that is within, 
tends to become outward, but it is within, be- 
fore it is without, though it is the outward only, 
that the eye sees. So of every mode of wrong, 



198 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

in feeling, thinking, or action, its first move- 
ment is on the soul that produces it, its retri- 
bution is in the moment of its creation, and 
yet evil cannot be, strictly speaking, creative, 
but destructive : it is the action of force, pro- 
ducing disorganization and decay, like the 
principle of corruption in the outward world : 
'^ the end of it," as one of the saints says, " is 
death." Death is the ultimate of evil : that 
is, the extreme antagonist of life : pain, decay, 
loss, whether of body or soul, is the prelude to 
death. 

Evil reacts upon the soul, in loss, decay, 
death : it is loss, decay, death : it is the con- 
quest of the power of darkness, against which 
God and nature war : therefore is it so abhor- 
rent, because the soul is life, and cries out for 
life continually. Retribution is, then, the re- 
asserting of the law of creation, which per- 
vades the universe ; even evil is drawn into 
the action of this law, and produces its kind 
in loss, pain. — in one word, death. That which 
we put from us in thought, word, or act, is 
ours, and yet not ours : we produce it, and yet 
cannot rule it : it assumes a life of its own : 
as the child is the child of his mother, and yet 
himself: though born from her bosom, he es- 



RETRIBFTION. 199 

capes from her control, and becomes either an 
angel to bless, or a demon to curse. We fan- 
cy, a word, an act, a little thing, a very little 
thing, — and lo, it becomes "a lion in our path." 
Our words and acts always return to us, in 
some or another form : we may not recognise 
these spiritual offspring, but good or bad, ra- 
diant or hideous, they always wear the image 
of ourselves : ourselves, and yet another. 

We see the utter impossibility of escaping 
from this law of reproduction, because it is not 
ours, — but a law, that encompasses and en- 
velopes us. The soul and all nature partakes 
of the creative life of its original : this is the 
fearfulness and glory of our nature, the fear- 
fulness and glory of retribution. 

This is grand, but sad. The inviolability of 
the law of retribution, the impossibility of ab- 
rogating it, is awfully solemn : its statement 
leaves a weight upon the soul, its extreme 
statement is resisted by the soul. And this is 
the most wonderful thing of all ; a law, which 
all recognise as inviolable, to dream of escap- 
ing from its fearful pressure ! The instinct of 
the human soul has led it to seek means of 
such escape, but in vain : and yet the instinct 
of man is true, is holy, and when men say. 



200 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the results of sin may be washed away by re- 
pentance, or some other mode, is it not a nar- 
row way of stating a great truth ? The soul 
is born to live, not to die, and sin leads to death. 
The evil that has gone forth will, must do its 
work, but in the soul is the principle of vi- 
tality, and already in a new act, it begins a 
new life, that if it have free scope, must over- 
come its adversary, — death. 

Let, to the most degraded, come an emotion of 
repentance, an aspiration, an effort : it is a germ 
of new life : it too is creative, creative of life, for 
all good is life : it too creates after its kind : it is 
the reception of higher life to the soul, and if 
cherished, the soul is already forming to itself 
a new life, which is immortal, and must over- 
come the effects of evil, wdiich, by their nature, 
issue in death. 

The thoughts, words, deeds of evil of the 
past, have gone on their way, working con- 
fusion and corruption in our souls, and the 
souls of others, and outv/ardly in our own life 
and environments, and the life and circum- 
stance of others, — that cannot be recalled : 
what has been, has been : but there is hope : 
life is stronger than death : if spiritual life has 
begun now, it, too, has gone, and is going on 



RETRIBUTION. 201 

its way, restoring disorder to order, confusion 
to harmony, reuniting the elements set free 
by corruption, into new forms of growth : sin 
is mortal, and leads to death, — goodness is im- 
mortal, and must overcome its foe. This is 
the triumph of the son, the spiritual nature, — 
it shall put all evil under its feet. 

The soul is creative, but the creations only 
that have the principle of life, are immortal. 
Sin tends to dissolution : it is the opposite to life, 
to unity, thence its fearfulness, the hideous 
nature of its train, a train that ends in death. 
In the filial nature of the soul, is renewal. 
The soul receives life from God, and in this 
reception, overcomes evil : that w'hich it cre- 
ates, comes to it again, as heaven, not as hell : 
for the soul becomes by obedience to its gifts, 
that son, to whom the Father hath given life in 
himself, and it giveth unto its own, that they 
may have life in themselves, and there is no 
more condemnation to those who live this life, 
because the old things have passed away. 



17 



202 STUDIES IJM RELIGION* 



THE FUTURE. 

We will assume the fact of immDrtality, 
that is, the continuance of individual con- 
sciousness, under all changes : it cannot 
be proved : it exists with the presence of 
the soul, and is its essential attribute. Ad- 
mit the existence of spirit, and we admit im- 
mortality : that which we call spirit, being 
the invisible power or reality, that is behind 
and above the outward, the substance, across 
which the outward passes as shadow. These 
appearances, every thing that touches the 
senses, all that exists in time, changes, — is now 
one form, now another : that which is a seed 
to-day, is a flower to-morrow, — that which was 
organized matter, yesterday, leaves, fruit, trees, 
has become to-day, decayed mould, and to- 
morrow will be resolved into its elements, to be 
remoulded into new forms : the forms of things 
are perpetually changing, are in constant flux 
and reflux : that which this moment is invisi- 
ble vapor, is the next cloud, and again the 
rain-drop, in endless transmigration : we can 



THE FUTURE. 203 

mention nothing that is not the form of some- 
what, and all forms are in their nature eva- 
nescent : all the outward is form, and form, is 
mortal, subject to change and decline. Now 
to this continual flow and reflow of forms, we 
necessarily oppose somewhat, — whose essen- 
tial attributes are directly opposed to that of 
form : as form is corruptible, mutable, mortal, 
that which underlies the form is necessarily 
incorruptible, immutable, immortal, and of this 
substance of the shadow, of this spirit of the 
sensuous, we are a part. Proving the immor- 
tality of the soul or spirit, is like proving the 
mortality of the mortal, the redness of the red, 
or the sweetness of the sweet. It is it, itself, 
not belonging to it, but that which constitutes 
it, what it is. There can be no meaning in 
the question, is the soul immortal ? But grant- 
ing its presence, what do we know of its modes 
of being ? Its present condition of being, what 
we call its present life, is passing ofl": the body 
and its environments are slipping away from 
us, year by year, — what will be the manner of 
the soul's existeuce after this vanishes ? 

Our question is about forms and modes: the 
fact of existence is assumed ; in the region of 
forms come doubts and queries : the know- 



204 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

ledge we kave of realities is certain, intuitive : 
that which we have of forms, is conjectural, 
speculative. 

Does revelation of any kind throw light 
upon this question of the succession of forms, 
modes ? I do not think this inquiry idle, be- 
cause the true study of forms of existence, 
helps us to realize the soul's independence of 
forms, and its consciousness to i^tself, the one 
great fact. 

In nature, forms or modes of existence are 
always evolved one out of the other : it is a 
change and yet a similarity, another and yet 
the same : to take the somewhat worn illustra- 
tion of the vapor, condensed it is cloud, far- 
ther condensed, rain-drop, on the ground, in the 
air, in the river, — how unlike, and yet under 
all these, we detect a lurking likeness : one 
seems naturally born from the other : it is change 
but not extinction : the light which was now 
sun-beam, becomes imprisoned in the hues 
and streaks of the flower, another and yet the 
same : in all forms, with which we are ac- 
quainted, there seems a sensp of individuality 
carried : they run into each other, but so im- 
perceptibly, that they do not cease to be them- 
•selves, in becoming the other : our associations 



THE FUTURE. 205 

are not ruptured by the change, — sometimes 
the imagination is startled, but always, I 
think, delighted at the recognition of oneness 
in variety. 

It is forced upon us, by experience and ana- 
logy, that the form of humanity will follow the 
same law : how unlike w^e are now, than when 
infants ; indeed, if they tell us truly, not a 
particle of material composes us now, as then, 
and yet those who knew us then and now, have 
no difficulty in recognising us by the eye : and 
if this be true of the outward, so is it of the 
inward constitution : how many forces, have 
assailed the unity of our minds and hearts, — 
what internal action, what outward influences ! 
Yet as far as memory runs back, and yet far. 
ther, are we another and yet the same : a 
change so gradual, that it seems scarce change. 
We know from experience, that change of 
form does not disturb the soul's consciousness 
to itself, and that such change never seems 
sudden to the subject of it. May n©t this hint 
to us, that the mode of existence, previous to 
what we call death and posterior to it, is not 
so startlingly different as many seem to think ? 
The change is great, between blooming youth 
and wrinkled age, and yet the old man cannot 
17* 



206 STUDIES IN RELI&ION. 

lay his finger on the point of time, when youth 
vanished into maturity, and maturity melted 
into age : and in the states of our conscious- 
ness, how changed does a succession of time 
find us, in opinion, feeling, principles of action, 
and yet we cannot draw the boundary line, 
between our present and former selves. Out- 
ward and inward, there has been no sudden 
disruption, no breaking away violently from 
the past, but gradually and almost uncon- 
sciously finding one's self apart from it. Does 
not the experience of the soul, whisper some- 
thing of the relation it sustains to form ? 

Nature teaches us change, never extinction 
of form. . We see that decay, dissolution, are 
modes of existence as well as growth and 
efflorescence. What we call death to the body 
is but change of form to the spirit, and experi- 
ence and analogy teach that this mode of exis- 
tence cannot be so utterly unlike and diverse 
from that which the spirit has just put off*, be- 
cause in all nature, unlike is evolved from the 
like, not suddenly, not frightfully, but gradually 
and gently. This would give to the soul after 
death a human organization, more delicate 
than the present, but answering to that just 
worn, as face answers to face in the glass, 



THE FtJTURE. 207 

or perhaps as the matured form answers to the 
same individual in infancy, or as the butterfly 
answers to the caterpillar, the former being 
only the worm expanded into wings — another 
and yet the same. These thoughts help to fill 
up the gulf which is dug by the senses, be- 
tween the living and the dead. The words 
dead and death are words of the senses : to the 
spirit, all things live. Fear of death is fear of 
the untried — a feeling as if the soul would be 
overwhelmed, horrified by change : it is the 
want of the soul, being conscious to itself, feel- 
ing its own presence and its sovereignty to 
forms or modes of existence : these it fears as 
fraught to it with pain or peril, not realizing 
that it is in itself alone, lies the power more or 
less, which forms of existence exert over it. 
The soul must make its future, as it makes its 
present, and in the same way, by the putting 
forth of its varied powers, — by action in time 
and space, of a spirited energy, that transcends 
time and space, creating a heaven about it, 
by the harmony of its manifestations with 
eternal law, or the opposite, through collision 
and discord : the picture given to some of our 
childish minds of heaven as a place of song 
and praise, owes its prevalence to a truth : but 



208 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the song is the harmonious action of spirits re- 
volving each in its appointed orbit, and Milton 
spoke highest truth, when he describes the 
gates of hell, as "harsh grating on their 
hinges." We are continually experiencing 
what this harmony means, as life comes gra- 
dually out of disorder into order, and through 
growth of thought and love we attain by de- 
grees unto unity of inward being : in feeble- 
ness and sinfulness we are conscious of being 
out of place, '' out of tune :" all is confusion 
within us. Motives clash and interfere, pas- 
sions and principles contend, sense and spirit 
strive : our aim is distracted, our ideal wan- 
dering, our practice unequal and unsatisfac- 
tory : this state carried to extremes is that dis- 
organization and tumult and revolt of all the 
spiritual powers which men's minds have pic- 
tured by images of blackness and terror : the 
opposite to this is order, unity, clearness of ideal, 
oneness of aim, and consequently oneness of 
action, which we call heaven, and which the 
poet has not left unsung : that city of the soul, 
" which has no need of the sun, neither of the 
moon, for the glory of God lightens it :" the 
action of spirits in time must always tend to 
these two results, and this action is always 



THE FUTURE. 209 

from within outward, so that a chancre of form 
cannot bring inward clearness to a dark spirit, 
fflor envelope in gloom one that dwells in light, 
— but the outward must take character from 
'the inward, answer to that part for part, unless 
body is stronger than soul, and the shadow has 
power to alter the shape of the thing shadow- 
ed. The senses are imprisoned in form : we 
cannot conceive of spirit separate from form, 
that is not the difficulty, but it lies in our not 
conceiving of it, independent of it : its free pas- 
sage through form : we imprison it in that 
which we see : thus the ancient Egyptians are 
said to have believed in the immortality of the 
soul, but only in some way connected with the 
continuance of the body, thence their immense 
labors for the body's preservation: they made 
the soul prisoner to the form they saw : not 
realizing that spirit is entire, but forms succes- 
sive, that throughout all nature forms are in 
constant change, but spirit, inviolable and in- 
destructible, soars in each, but above all. 

The oriental doctrine of the transmigration 
of souls covers a truth, but vitiated by the 
shutting out of the infinite. Souls do pass 
from form to form, but the law of migration is 
ascension, not repetitions the error of transmi- 



210 STUDIES m RELlGiOi^. 

gration seems to be this continual revolution 
through prescribed modes of existences, this 
treading over passed modes of being, this im- 
prisonment in the finite, this reanimating of 
dead forms, not creating of new ones, this turn- 
ing back to the past, not advancing upon the 
future : thus the doctrine of Budhism, of ulti- 
mate annihilation, is the cry of the soul for de- 
liverance from the chain of the past, of slavery 
to the finite. The soul abhors return to its 
outworn modes : it tends to the infinite, seeks 
new and ever new manifestations, as it is itself 
perpetually renewed by the inspirations of 
God. The soul is one ; there can be to it but 
one life ; it knows no time, though it acts in 
time. What it is, it does; what it does, it 
has. 

The vanished are not dead, only changed in 
form, and that change must include the/eten- 
tion of a form and mode of life, not harshly op- 
posed to that just laid by, but the result of it, 
as our present bodies are the result of our 
hitherto physical life, and our present modes of 
thinking and acting the result of past habits of 
thinking and acting. The vanished are then the 
learning, loving, rejoicing, or obstructed, sor- 
rowing beings as here — subjects of the law, yet 



THE FUTURE. 211 

children of the spirit, putting forth in some of 
the infinite modes that express the change or 
progression of the living spirit. 

Sometimes we say, reasoning from the 
known action of spirit in consciousness, or its 
observed transitions in nature, is not quite suf- 
ficient : we would know how far the wise, the 
inspired confirm this truth. This is right — 
the highest inspired, that is, they who realize 
most fully the presence of the soul, can speak 
truliest of its destiny : the soul tells its own 
secrets : he who listens most closely to its 
whispers is authorized to say what it reveals. 

In eighteen hundred years the world has not 
reversed the testimony borne to Jesus of Na- 
zareth, that " never man spake like this 
man :" let us then see, what the peerless 
says, " they shall come from the grave, they, 
that •have done good to the resurrection of 
life, and they that have done evil to the resur- 
rection of condemnation :'' they shall come 
forth as they have laid down, the good into 
the reviving again to a life of goodness, the 
evil to their life of condemnation : death de- 
stroys neither the one nor the other : they rise 
up from the body, the same spiritual being 
they lived in the body : whenever Jesus refers 



212 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

to life after death, he speaks of it as answer- 
ing to the present, as one future ever answers 
to its past : it is the offspring of the present. 
The spiritual knows but one life ; to the good, 
he says, there is the same continual reward, to 
the evil, the same continual trouble, as if he 
would impress that death made no difference, 
but that the soul created as ever unto evil or 
good. The inviolability of the soul recognised, 
he refers to no modes of existence : his con- 
viction of the supremacy of the soul being such, 
this or that manner of its life, seems scarce to 
have occurred to him : man is what he is, not 
how he lives : soul being the same, man is the 
same : his being makes his living : the good 
awake to good, the evil to evil, here and every- 
where, now and ever. Paul is more curious ; 
he is particularly interested in answering the 
question. With what hody do the dead rise ? 
He argues, that as the seed-grain has a form, 
and every individual seed its own form, so 
will the human spirit not be left denuded, but 
will receive a body appropriate to itself, more 
ethereal, more delicate perhaps,' than that once 
visible to us, but still differing and conform- 
able to each individual character, as one star 
differs from another, and this change, accord- 
ing to him, is from the lower to the higher, 



THE FUTURE. 213 

as mortal ever seeks to become the immortal, 
and the corruptible the incorruptible. 

What is the result of this ? Much : it les- 
sens the distance between the living and the 
dead, tends to divest the one of their strange- 
ness and the other of their awe : obliterates 
the dividing line between present and future : 
helps us to realize that this future, inwardly 
and outwardly, is formed from the materials of 
every present thought, word and act—- sur- 
rounds us with legions of invisible, yet grow- 
ing, struggling, rejoicing or mourning, as the 
case may be, but still human beings, beloved 
and loving, weeping and smiling, hoping and 
fearino: : convinces us that all our aims have a 
tendency, our acquisitions, an use, that nothing 
comes to a termination, but the wealth of hopes, 
instincts, presentiments, aspirations, powers, 
working feebly in the present, have all the in- 
terminable future for satisfaction and fruition ; 
and this conviction, that no vision of childhood, 
no dream of youth, no longing '' the impossible 
to be," no effort, however blindly working this 
way and that way is lost, that " nothing is in 
vain," — will surely have that effect upon life 
which Paul foretold for it, the " making it to 
abound" in noble and divine works. 
18 



214 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 



SOUND, 

A LITTLE brook, by the highway side, 
Stirs, when the earth grows warm in spring ; 
Its voice is tripping, bubbling, rustling, — 
The humble music of a brook ; 
Through the grass you may see it glisten : 
You need not turn aside to look ; 
But listen, listen. 

When the summer goes ; in the walk beside, 
In the garden, in the forest-park, 
The leaves fall off, — the crown and pride ; 
They rustle downward in the dark : 
Seek them not, — 'tis all in vain ; 
Leave them to the snow and rain : 
But hark, hark. 

All seasons, — when the day is sped, 
Linger by the ocean-bed. 
Its under-rumbling is the roar 
Of breakers on another shore, 
Bringing lofty thoughts and fear; 
Gaze not on its liquid rest ; 
It may tempt thee to its breast : 
But hear, hear. 

Sounds are from eternity, 
Swelling, falling, warning, calling, 
Underneath or overhead, 



SOUND. 215 



Mystical and grand are they. 
What we see is formed and lined^ 
Narrow, bound, and limited. 
Sound is fathomless, divine ; 
Sights may glisten ; — 
Truth is for the open ear. 
Hush, and listen ; 

Hark, and hear. 



HOME. 



In the poem of Isaiah, is a delightful picture of 
the return of an exiled people to their native 
land : the coming-home of a whole people, and 
never was a coming home more nobly sung. 
The poet knew man's heart, how w^ell it loves 
its home, how great is its tenderness, — and 
that it is this alone, that breaks up the formal 
silence of nature, and makes it to weep tears 
of sad or joyful sympathy : it is not the garden, 
not the flower-blest valley, but the wild and 
wind-haunted " wilderness," and the " solitary 
place " that for itself knows no echo of love's 
voice or step, that is " glad " for the home-re- 



216 STUDIES IN RELKJION. 

turners, — and it is the hard bosom of the " de. 
sert^' that ''blossoms abundantly" to crown 
their festival. Do not the lame, " leap " on 
their way, and they, whose heart and lip were 
stilled in the stranger's presence, do they not 
" sing '^ again, like a child at play ? How 
purifying is this home-feeling, that can trans- 
form the " unclean places " of thought and 
life, aye, even ^' where the dragons have 
lain," into ways of holiness. Is knowledge, 
is genius needed, for this home-return ? Alas, 
then, for the witless bird, that trusts its wing on 
the trackless air : the heart guides home, and 
though "• a fool, " in all else, it '' never errs 
therein." 

The poet sings the sadness of exile, the joy 
of the home-coming, and all men say, that he 
speaks truth : let him gather upon his song 
all the extravagances of his own glowing fan- 
cy, and the universal instinct bears him out : 
a feeling so intense and wide must have its 
root in a reality, deeper than the eye sees : as 
sweet as is the outward fact, our love is sub- 
limer than it : man's thought is on the finite, 
but his emotion belongs to the infinite: home 
and home-sickness, and home-return, are pic- 
tures of realities in the soul — the workings 



HOME. 



217 



through time of a spiritual instinct — thence 
their pathos and power. There is such a thing 
as spiritual exile : we are not at home : we are 
out of place, in feeling, in position, knowledge, 
and all our efforts after truth are efforts to find 
ourself perfectly at ease, to have the power of 
free, unencumbered action. It is said that we 
know those who are at home in God, who have 
attained to free spiritual activity, who lean on 
the bosom of the Father, not so much seekers 
as havers, not so much questioners as listeners^ 
who do not, in the spiritual kingdom, wander 
about here and there, to find a place to stand 
in, but have found their place. Some scarce 
know what they think or feel, on what prin- 
ciples they act, to what ideal they tend, but 
are in search of such : having no fixed point, 
they have no horizon peculiar to themselves-. 
We want to find our home in truth, to know 
where we stand, and whither we go, to become 
acquainted with our bearings, and so not be 
tossed about on an unknown sea. We must 
believe something : universal doubt is entire 
homelessness — not having even a temporary 
abode for shelter. But the first essential of 
true home is, that it be our own : " home is 
home," is the inspired song of the aflTections : 
18* 



218 STUDIES IN EELIGION. 

the peasant's is as dear to him as the prince's : 
not its gloom or splendor, not its poverty or 
wealth, is its magic, but that it be our own : 
this is a wonderful fact : opinions, views, 
hopes, to bring ultimate repose, must have this 
quality ofownness: if otherwise, no matter how 
brilliant or sound they may be, there will al- 
ways be something strange and foreign about 
them : it is not the house we have grown up 
in : it may be far belter, reared of marble, at 
great toil and cost, but the dweller in the pa- 
lace always bethinks him of the cottage of his 
childhood. 

How shall we find out what we believe ? By 
noting that upon which we act. That upon 
which we act is our own faith, — that upon 
which we do not act, is not our faith, fancy it 
as we may. This is a good test. What opin- 
ion, or principle, or feeling, do we act upon ? 
What is the food of every day ? To one it 
may be a conviction, to another a sentiment ; 
but, whatever it be, that produces action, — is 
our belief, nothing else. Jesus refers to his 
acts, as proofs of his divinity : " My works 
bear witness to me." Just so do our works 
bear witness to us. Our faith cannot be hid- 
den. Life is a traitor, and tells the secret we 



HOME. 219 

would keep. We imagine we believe one 
thing, and do, in reality, believe another. Let 
us say, that we believe virtue is the only good , 
but if, in life, we seek other good ; if we are 
unhappy at not obtaining it, does not this show 
that we were quite mistaken, that many things 
rival virtue with us, perhaps surpass it ? Let 
us say, that a chivalric generosity is the most 
ennobling sentiment ; that to give without pay, 
to pour forth talent, time, kindness, without 
thought of return, is regal and sublime ; is the 
sign and token of intellectual and moral wealth : 
that it is only the poor in intellect, the feeble in 
virtue, who would be paid in kind, for what 
they do, let us rejoice in the fancied lavish 
of our mental treasures, thoughts, and con- 
victions, and feelings : yet, if we find ourself 
touched by neglect, hurt by unkindness from 
those to whom we have done kindness, pining 
with the indifference of those to whom we have 
given of our mind or heart, it shows that we 
were under an error ; that we gave not in regal 
profuseness, but lent or sold only. What is 
our desire to have our kindnesses or powers 
felt, but a wish to be paid for what we do ? 
We are willing, we think, to impart time, 
thought, ability of any kind : we ask no re- 



220 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

turn, oh, no, we only wish our gifts appreci- 
ated ; and what is this desire of apprecia- 
tion, but giving with the hope of return, 
which is no gift at all. We are made to be 
givers, each in our way ; but we descend from 
our rank, and hire ourselves out for praise, for 
love, for approbation. Who gives most like a 
king, he who would have others count his 
money, as they take it, and tell him how much 
each piece is worth, or he who throws in hand- 
fulls the uncounted gold, and lets it be gathered 
for more or less ? If a sovereign be indiscri- 
minately taken with a heap of farthings, shall 
the regal giver heed it ? Suppose we impart 
to others, knowledge of truths that we have 
wrung from the fathomless mine of toil and 
sorrow, and they receive it as carelessly 
as if it were the merest common-places of 
experience ; suppose we manifest to another 
kindness and friendliness, that with us have 
been the victory over resentment and pride, and 
myriad wounded sensibilities, and he or she 
to whom we show it, take it as a due, unknow- 
ing or uncaring what it cost, — will our gift 
t)e any the less for that ? We are sons of God, 
let us give as sons of God, time, thought, for- 
bearance, and forgiveness, patience and help : 



HOME. 221 

what though they who receive, neither know 
nor care for the giver, cannot we afford to 
throw away, — -we, whose treasure-house is the 
perpetual inspiration of the eternal Father ? 
That which we live, we believe : every living 
thing has faith in somewhat, for faith is the 
food of life. If we believe in God, we shall 
live to God : if we believe in vanity, in false- 
ness, we shall live to them. There is no diffi- 
culty in finding out what we believe ; but, for 
this purpose, we need not think over what w^ 
have heard others say, or have said ourself, 
but simply ask, From what motive, in what 
sentiment, did I act or speak yesterday, to- 
day, now ? This belief or sentiment is the 
home we are dwelling in : we will not hide 
our eyes to it, and fancy we are living in other 
mansions : if we wish to go on^ we must find 
out where we are : if we would attain to the 
true home of the soul, we must learn in what 
shanty it is now cowering. 

The home-instinct of the soul is so strong, 
that notions to which we have once given cre- 
dence, are tenaciously clung to, as eternal 
truth. There is something touching in this 
attachment to long established modes of thought 
and life: the garniture of some minds has 



222 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

been wholly transmitted from a revered an- 
cestry : they are paternal mansions in which 
they act or sleep, when comes upon these the 
ruthless tide of reformation, it rushes into the 
crevices, it swells to the roof-top : the home 
reels and totters : the man strives to save it, or 
if that be impossible, to save some of its trea- 
sures, the picture that kindled his father's ge- 
nius, the arbor that sheltered his mother's 
softness, the cradle that rocked his child : but 
i^n vain : the sea of innovation washes them all 
away, and as he sees them retreat, rising and 
sinking in the waters, he says in despair, — 
" Every thing is gone." No wonder the con- 
servative calls the reformer a parricide : re- 
minds him of the comforts of that, he has des- 
troyed : how it has been a " refuge in the 
storm," "a covert from the heat :" how it has 
saved from the pit-falls of sin, that open every- 
where, and has no bottom, and how driven 
from it, man must wander up and down, a 
homeless stranger. 

But that which can be thus shaken, is no true 
home for the soul : forms and opinions are but 
its transient abodes : its true rest lies behind 
these, in the bosom of the infinite, which is the 
great fact of which home is the expression. 



HOME. 223 

There are two realities, the soul and God, eter- 
nally repeated in parent and child, — guardian- 
ship, repose, strength on the one side, on the 
other need, restlessness, and weakness ; the 
finite seeking the infinite, and the infinite des- 
cending into the finite, are the facts of which 
all life and nature are fables. 

As the soul is son to the eternal, its home is 
in the immortal and invisible ; if we are be- 
lieving in any thing that is temporary, we are 
liable to be disturbed by time and change ; if 
we are living in any sentiment less than the 
highest, we are constantly exposed to pain and 
weariness ; we are exiled, thence our doubts, 
our halfness ; we are dwarfed, we are uncul- 
tivated ; we live in houses too narrow, we, 
whose dominion is eternity. 

As life shows how far we have wandered, it 
hints the mode of return. And how is this 
done ? Simply in the elevation of the faith : 
while we have a low life, we have a low faith : 
while we have a low faith, we must have a low 
life. Let us do something heartily : if we be- 
lieve in falseness, in halfness, in compromise, let 
us not be surprised that we act it out : the 
stream rises as high as its fountain : we act, 
as we stand : our life shows to us, our posi- 



224 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

tion : do we do a mean act, do we speak a 
malicious word ? We believe in meanness, in 
malice, believe they will bring to us advantage, 
in some way ; it is so hard to free ourself from 
the delusion, that sin is a giver : to be sure, 
we are greater than our faults, for we are sons 
of God, and they are the husks on which we 
degrade us, by feeding ; but these vices re- 
veal where we stand : another sees it, we see 
it too, and have the power of altering our po- 
sition : we pass from that low ground and sta- 
tion ourself higher : if then, another say, we 
are mean or vain, they say, what is false ; if 
they point to the act or word as proof, we re- 
ply, that it is a past position : they aim, where 
we are not. But in order to pass on, we must 
know where we are, and the true instinct of man 
makes works the proof of faith : if you are a 
hero, where is your prowess ? if a saint, where 
your love and mercy ? 

Faith produces life ; and faith in the spiri- 
tual, the presence of thought over passion, of 
love over selfishness, comes by inspiration. 
" No man can come to me," said the mystic of 
Judea, " unless the Father draw him." To 
attain any spiritual position, light and truth 
must dawn from on high : but the conditions to 



HOME. 225 

this are in our hands : we can draw this fire 
from heaven. We know, that to have thought 
on any subject, we must bring upon it the ac- 
tion of our intellect, that is, just so much 
thought as we now possess, and then more 
comes : to have faith, in aught, we must exert 
that, in any degree, which we have, and more 
comes : love towards any object increases ten- 
fold through exercise : we love that person best 
for whom we sacrifice the most : the parent 
exhausts care, feeling, life, upon the child : 
surely, the fount is dried by the lavish outlay : 
no, it only over-brims, the more it is drawn 
upon : if you save my life, I may possibly in 
the whirl and shifts of time, forget it ; if I save 
yours, you have bound me to you forever : it 
is the giver feels gratitude, the lover, loves, the 
imparter receives : man may love God, but 
God must love man : the child is a sovereign, 
because all around him are chained to his feet, 
by their needed ministries : the child opposes 
and teazes the parent, but the parent never 
vexes and troubles the child : man spurns at, 
and wrestles with God, but God can only love 
the infant of his bosom. 

As love increases love, so does thought bring 
thought, and thought is the mother of feeling, 
19 



226 STTJDIES IN RELIGION. 

and thought and feeling united, tend irresisti- 
bly to become life. Would we live spiritually, 
we must think on spiritual things: '^consider" 
is the old bible word, and it comes from a deep 
experience : the true mode of spiritual growth 
is to think : certainly, the action of the intellect 
alone is not sufficient : " the heart must be- 
lieve :" but the tendency of thought is to deepen 
love : the more we think of a truth, the more 
we love it, — the more we love it, the more we 
think of it : thought and love play into each 
other's hands ; the deeper the thought, the full- 
er the love, the more does it strive to become 
life : a genuine conviction always triumphs : 
let our thought be our deepest and truest, and 
it will work forth through word and deed, with 
more or less energy: but our thoughts are half- 
thoughts, our convictions half- convictions, and 
no wonder they are so feeble against ambition 
and vanity, which are vigorous and awake r 
the odds are too great : it is the feeble to the 
strong. 

We seem to ourselves, unjust to our princi- 
ples, because in some calm hour, we are at 
peace with all mankind, but when trial comes, 
passion has the mastery: our principle is 
there, but it bows before that, which is stronger 



HOME. 227 

than it: we love our brother, when he inter- 
feres with no plan, crosses no prejudice, wounds 
no sensibility of ours, but when he does this, 
love is scattered like chaff, before the wind of 
hate : our love is doubtless very brave, but 
vanity by force or stratagem wins the victory : 
might does not make right, but it shows that it 
is might, and nothing else. 

Action flows from thought and love, and that, 
which is most predominant, will appear : all, 
that is within, tends to become the without : 
faith is continually passing into works, and 
these works in all the varieties of individual 
manifestation, tell the secret of the heart. We 
must have faith, indeed : " by it, were the 
heavens made :" no picture is painted, no poem 
sung, no life made divine, without the conscious 
presence of a reality, of which the outward is 
a phantasm : but works betray how much or 
how little of this is existent in any one : life, 
like some insects, shows by its color the leaf 
which it feeds upon : and yet we feel an in- 
stinctive protest, at being thus tried by what 
we do : life does not tell our whole ideal : our 
short-comings are always in our way : most 
true, we are greater than our life ; but it is, 
alas, a good mile-stone to show how far we 



228 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

have got along. But let us have patience with 
ourselves : the human soul, is a child, set down 
in the midst of new things, and it takes time 
to find the right course : here is a highway, 
without hill or winding, and there a bye-path 
of danger and difficulty ; then again a dim- 
ness covers the eyes, and the paths melt one 
into the other, and the apples of promise wave, 
now on this side, now on that, and when the 
vertigo passes, we seem not to have moved a 
step. But let us be of good cheer : " God is 
never in a hurry :'^ the livers to the finite must 
haste and crowd, and vex themselves with toil 
and confusion, because their sun rises in the 
east, and hastens to its west ; but the pilgrims 
for eternity may be serene : great space and 
scope is theirs for experiment and action. God 
is absolute serenity : no shock announces the 
moment he incarnates himself: no ripple is at 
the junction of the seen and unseen : in the 
depths of ocean, all is still, though the tempests 
sweep above. 

It is not worth while to burden ourselves 
with the faults and errors of the past, if we 
are only steadily moving away from them. 
To be sure, our daily life is but a sad pigmy, 
to be born of such vast ideas and sublime 



HOME. 229 

prayers: but while we look upon it, it is 
vanished : and if we are true and free, 
another shadow of ourselves is being des- 
cribed around us, more fair and comely in its 
proportions : the deepest thought is tending 
to the strongest act : the most earnest feeling 
is continually moulding to itself the life. If 
love seem not now to have power over tempta- 
tion, it is constantly gaining that power : 
failure is of time, success of eternity : the 
tide of passions and vanities that assail our 
convictions of truth and duty, must gradu- 
ally subside, as these assume their natural 
sovereignty ; for truth and love are in their 
nature infinite, and necessarily attain and 
preserve sway over delusion and error, which 
are individual and finite. 

And when the soul thus lives in and for 
the eternal, will it not have learned the 
spiritual fact, that underlies the mystery of 
the home-feeling, and that God has shadowed 
to the race, in the instinct, by which the child 
clings to the roof that nurtured him, the 
patriot falls in defence of his fire-side, and 
the exile moans, in his dying delirium, for the 
breath of his native land ? Man is unwittingly 
bound to God, through his deepest sympathies; 



230 STUDIES IN RELIGION. 

the affections and impulses that fill finite life 
with pathos and beauty, are the very ties that 
unite it to the eternal and unseen. Surely, the 
Father treats us, as wayward, yet beloved 
children ; wiling us to Himself, from all the 
circuitous forms and modes of being, by an in- 
stinct, that, amid the fulness of the transient, 
yearns for the enduring ; so that, 

" If goodness lead us not ; yet weariness 
May toss us to his breast." 



I 



THE END. 



BOOKS PUBLISHED BY 
C. §HEPARI>, 

191 BROADWAY, NEW- YORK. 

PIOUS THOUGHTS, CONCERNING THE KNOWLEDGE 
AND LOVE OF GOD. Translated from the French of Fene- 
lon, by Mrs. Mant. 

PIOUS REFLECTIONS FOR EVERY DAY IN THE MONTH. 

Translated from Fenelon. 

CHRISTMAS HOME, AND OTHER POEMS. By the Author 
of Christmas Bells. &c. 

THE PROGRESS OF PASSION : a Poem, in Four Books. By 
Rev. Henry W. Sweetser, A. M. 

THE AGE : a Satire. By Alfred Wheeler. 

ELEMENTS OF EMPIRE. By Hon. Wm. H. Seward. 

TEXT-BOOK OF ELOQUENCE. Edited by George Vanden- 
hoff. 

A PLAIN SYSTEM OF ELOCUTION. By George Vanden- 

hoff. Second edition. 

The first edition of Vanderihoff^s System of Elocution having 
been exhausted in the short space of four months, a second edi- 
tion is now published, considerably enlarged^ with a view of serving 
the purpose of a Reader and Speaker in Schools, as well as a 
theoretical Instructor. The Publisher is happy in presenting, 
from among many others, the following high testimonials to the 
merits of the work, which has only been four months in print, but 
is already extensively used in academies and private families : 
Prom the Rev. R. T. Huddart, {Classical Academy, Houston st.) 

It affords me much pleasure to add my testimony to the value, 
importance, and advantage of Mr. George Vandenhoff 's Work on 
Elocution. He has aptly styled it '* a.plain System :" such it truly 
is to those who will pursue the instruction given, step by step ; 
and cannot fail of producing a beneficial and much wished-for re- 



suit in one of the departments of education so sadly neglected— 
correct rettcZmg-— devoid of vulgarities, and errors in articulation 
and pronunciation. I hope the book virill have a wide circulation, 
in order that the good which it is_capable of effecting may be thus 
more extensively diffused, and a better system of instruction be 
afforded to the rising generation, in that which constitutes a most 
agreeable accomplishment in every gentleman's education, name- 
ly, " Logical and Musical Declamation.^^ 

(Signed) R. Townsend Huddart. 
New- York, March 14, 1845. 

From Mrs. Lawrence, {Academy^ Stuyvesant Place.) 
I have great pleasure in stating that Mr. G. Vandenhoff 's work 
on Elocution has been used with so much success in my school, 
that I can safely recommend it, to all who may desire improve-, 
ment in that elegant branch of education, as the most simple^ clear^ 
and concise treatise on the subject, and well adapted to the compre- 
hension of any mind. (Signed) Julia Lawrence. 
March Sth, 1845. 

FromRev. R. F. Burnham, Rector of St. Paul's Church, Hoboken. 

Having seen, with much pleasure, a second edition, by your 
house, of " A Plain System of Elocution : or, Logical and Musical 
Reading and Declamation, by G. Vandenhoflf, Professor of Rheto- 
ric in the city of New-York," I beg leave to express to you my 
opinion of the high merit of that work. 

Its title is in keeping with the plan pursued in the book ; a rare 
fact in this age of making many books. In the work may be found 
what this age needs : a^system of elocution that presents to the 
learner something tangible ; and that combines meaning with 
beauty and beauty with force. What pupils in elocution are told 
by their preceptors to do, they may do, by the aid of the ocular 
rules, as I will call them, that are given in Mr. V.'s system, viz : 
" read according to the sense." And what those pupils are told 
by their preceptors to cultivate, they may attain, by the aid ofthe 
unerring rules that are laid down in Mr. V.'s system, viz : " eu- 
phony and energy of expression." 

I here express the opinion, that the Principals of Seminaries 
of Learning would benefit the department of elocution by the in- 
troduction of Mr. Vandenhoflf's system ; and that our youth 
would benefit themselves, in the study of elocution, by the use of 
that gentleman's system under his tuition. 

From one who is indebted to " A Plain System of Elocution." 
(Signed) R. F. Burnham. 

THE FOUNT, OR LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET, arranged 
in such a manner as to be easily formed into words by the 
child. 

From the Commercial Advertiser. 
' About the most sensible thing in the way of amusement cards 
for children, is The Fount. We placed a case in the hands of a 
little thing, with decided advantage.to her advancement in letters. 



I 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 

Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: April 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



■^m. 



